[tynman]

It's a painful learning curve, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth it. I used to do all my apps in jQuery and was pretty adept at cross-component communication using events. Angular made me think about SPAs in a completely different way, and I'd never go back.

It's very popular to deride a framework or a language because it's too hard to learn. My experience is that I grow as a developer if I can think about problems from different perspectives. As an old professor used to remind us, "It's good for the soul."

As for speed, now that I'm fluent in Angular I can do a lot more in less code. Since Angular is opinionated on structure and there's been a strong community effort toward standardizing architecture and style, the tooling (seed projects and generators) has come a long way in the past couple of years.