> However, there's one thing keeping me from using Dart more professionally, and that's how surprisingly difficult it is to work with JSON out of the box.
We've talked about this a lot on the team. We definitely know it's a problem but so far we haven't had enough bandwidth to devote anyone to really digging in and addressing it. (It turns out that redesigning a type system and re-implementing the entire front end takes a lot of work...)
Hopefully once things settle down after Dart 2 we can take another look at this.