When I'm choosing to be involved with something, I always look to the people I'll have to engage with. It's very much a date.
For a programming framework, it would be the dev community around it. First I see if there is a community forming, that's a really good indicator if the technology is good and if it's here to stay. Then I start building a small app with the technology and interacting with people in the community online and offline. If the technology is meeting my needs and the community members are pleasant and helpful then I'll commit.
Not being able to use NPM modules directly is kind of a bummer, but they can be ported to Meteor Packages.
Looking through Feathers, it does not seem very beginner friendly and there is a lot of configurations needed. I believe one of the reason Meteor gained a lot of traction because it was extremely beginner friendly. As I developed more Meteor apps I have also been able to utilize advance features as well. There was something for everyone.
With regard to the funding, I think that is a good thing. Big name investors won't invest in something they don't think will be at least 10x better than what currently exist. If something is that much better there will definitely be a way to make money without compromising the product. Google is a great example. They display ads based on your search history. If I'm looking to buy some shoes, I wouldn't mind ads about shoe promotions. I believe the lead investor is A16Z and Marc Andressen cofounded Netscape, so I have confidence in them.
Competition is great none the less, so I hope Feathers pressures Meteor to constantly be better.
Here is an example project I'm working on if you need some insight to Meteor's capabilities. It's MATLAB in the cloud, so you could share Fiddles and build APIs that need computational capabilities: https://SaturnAPI.com