[JPKab]

I share your concerns regarding "walled garden." Are you aware of Meteorite, and the Atmosphere repository? Essentially Meteorite is an open package manager which wraps the meteor functionality, and allows installation of all of the third party packages on Atmosphere.

I do want to point out one difference I've noticed when using Meteor: ease of implementation.

Once the "accounts-ui" package is added, here is the code that is added (in two respective files) to implement a login/registration function:

    <div style="float: right; margin-right:20px;">
		{{loginButtons align="right"}}
    </div>

and

Accounts.ui.config({ passwordSignupFields: 'USERNAME_AND_OPTIONAL_EMAIL' });