I was really excited about component when it came out, but having used it in production projects, the shine has certainly worn off. The endless updating of component.json, and the resulting duplication of effort, the fact that using component alone is not enough (many things are only available with bower) and the lack of support for sourcemaps means I've switched to browserify for new projects and I'm much happier.
When you say "endless updating of component.json", do you mean the changes to the component api and therefore the required updates to the component.json file?
I chose component a few weeks ago after not wanting to export my angular modules as modules, I thought component has a nicer syntax for actual components.
no I mean, if you decide to use component to structure your own application, you must explicitly list the files and dependencies for each internal component in that application in its component.json. This doesn't sound like much, but it's overhead I don't want, especially because you often don't know that you've forgotten to do it until your build process is finished and your tests have run. I liked the idea at first, but the reality is that browserify accomplishes roughly the same thing without any of this manual work - it walks your `require()` tree instead, and it works with NPM which simply has more packages and more momentum. Also, source maps.
For me, it was that it always broke. It may have improved since I last used it, but I'd run into problems of getting cryptic errors in the browser console that were impossible to debug (lack of sourcemaps big part of that).