[tdumitrescu]

I've used brunch for a few years now and found it to be quite performant for my personal projects. Once it's set up it just works smoothly. Getting it set up though with the various plugins you need for your own build process can be a bit of a headache sometimes, and I've felt hedged in at certain points by its largely declarative config. I do think the benefits of its building and caching system are worth it for the standard frontend workflow needs and wish it had more mindshare/general community love.

[_broody]

Totally agree with you here. Brunch is fantastic for its minimal config requirements and super-fast performance. Oddly enough, in the JS world I've found it best to ignore all the hype around the latest and newest framework, and just go with something that has a small and loyal following and stick with it.

I mean, look at all the people who moved to working with Angular because it was "made by Google, so you could trust it to stick around". Now those people are using React, and soon they'll move to Angular 2. I've found that hyped technologies almost never have a fraction of the robustness and staying power that they claim to...

[pluma]

At the time I'd been as long with AngularJS as I have been with React now, I despised AngularJS and wanted to violently murder past-me who decided to use it.

With React I'm still as confident in my choice as I was a week into using it. In fact, the more I get to know it, the more confident I grow. With AngularJS, it was quite the opposite.

If anything I'd say that AngularJS being promoted by Google only made me more cautious about technologies promoted by Google. Google doesn't actually dogfood AngularJS. I know, they have some tool somewhere that uses it and apparently there are people using that tool, but it's not nearly as customer-facing as the code in which Facebook and Instagram use React.

But I didn't chose React because of the hype. In fact, AngularJS was still being hyped when I decided to try React. I tried React because someone recommend it to me and told me to give it five minutes of suspended judgement. If I had gone by my first impression, JSX and Facebook both would have scared me off.

[agrippanux]

I wrote Angular for 18 months and this is 100% the process I went through and the decisions I came to.