The core of the React render model is beautiful. It's far quicker to start writing and using a new component in React than in Angular, and the functional nature of React components feels good and highly productive. At first.

But the problem is, around that beautiful core, the React community has built a mass of libraries, meta-frameworks, techniques and practices that are decidedly less beautiful. After a while, I really found myself missing features from Angular, and struggling to replicate them by wiring together a hodge-podge React++ framework. Instead of being productive, I was wasting an inordinate amount of time trying to discover what the current micro-framework de-jour was for handling a particular problem in React.

For example, Angular supports view encapsulation. So you can write CSS targeting a component, and the framework will ensure that the style rules you write apply only to the HTML rendered by that components, without leaking to other parts of the app. This really is a godsend for properly isolating components in a reusable way. With React, there's a myriad of libraries for doing CSS, but most seem to be abandoned, and none seem to offer as straightforward or as easy style encapsulation as what Angular provides out of the box.

It was a similar story with forms. Which are a rich, reactive API in Angular, but seem to be an afterthought in React. And with dependency injection, both of singleton services and components elsewhere in the hierarchy.

I expect if you go all in on Redux, you can eventually build up a reasonable facsimile of what Angular provides. But from a standing start I think Angular is a much more productive framework, just because it's actually trying to be a framework, whereas React seems to be stuck somewhere between being a UI library and a framework, leaving the community to somewhat badly fill in the gaps.