[AdrianRossouw]

Are you sure you're not just under-thinking it?

Those 30 lines of code require the hundred or so lines of ngmin to actually work correctly, and then results in the extra (im assuming) hundred or so lines of grunt-ngmin and all the tooling around that. And then all the tests, the issues for the main project and all of the related projects, every bug that anybody has ever faced with minification of angular apps.

The auto-di is not that much simpler than the array format, and the array format is also actual valid javascript. They are abusing language features in such a way as to bypass the semantics of the language itself.

The fact that it doesn't survive minification is a sign that you shouldn't really be doing it to begin with. There are 3 different formats, and one of them introduces some crazy magic into the main framework, that is all really unnecessary and could just be as easily avoided. Auto-Di is the 'wonky' format in any reasonable context, I'm afraid.