[dpnewman]

Strongly suggest looking beyond this if your concern about Angular is that it is returning us to an old approach. Angular, on the contrary, in my experience, is a broadly conceived vision of how to rethink and move browser development significantly forward. I have been waiting for something like this. The key part of that ng-click is that it's an Angular 'directive'. I recommend adding AngularJs to your app to do a simple experiment of writing a few directives of your own; see if that doesn't light a bulb.