I admire parts of Angular's vision and think there are patterns where it shines, but it's never quite felt like they actually hit 2.0 to me. I haven't worked with it in a few versions, but I think it's just a different set of complexities.

There's always some big or missing thing right around the corner... reworking Material components for years, reworking internationalization, improvements to reactive forms, zoneless Angular, single file components, etc. And, for as many bugs as they fight down, it's always felt like there were several obvious frustrations waiting to be fixed. It's all just left me with an impression that the team bit off more than they could chew in creating such a holistic solution and can't quite get to something solid, hence the need to shed things like Protractor.

Hopefully the cumulative effort to improve gets them somewhere and helps get Angular into a more complete and compelling place for folks.

If Angular wasnt based on RXJS, I would agree with you that the defined structure of Angular makes it nice and predictable. RXJS pipe hell is a hell I wouldnt want to send my worst enemies to.