Show me any code that cannot be written faster and shorter using only jQuery, Underscore templates and a CommonJS compiler. Does not exist. You are writing enormous amounts of glue code to please AngularJS and getting lost in your obsession with tools, imagined reusability and over-complicated testing procedures.
You of course don't have to throw everything into directives but then you risk making your code less portable and your tests more brittle. Wrapping a jQuery plugin in a directive is so trivial it's not even worth mentioning, and it certainly doesn't result in "enormous amounts of glue code to please AngularJS".
> over-complicated testing procedures
And this is where you showed your hand. You can't have written tests for an angular app because if you had you wouldn't have made such a bizarre statement. Angular's dependency injection combined with the fantastic Karma test runner makes testing an absolute breeze.
If it is so trivial then it 'is' worth mentioning. Give an example or reference. Personally I like Angular, but I'm learning and finding articles like the OP's are great to read to have others' perspectives on how to work with it.
Where do I start and why is it better because of DI? Also Karma still requires something like Jasmine which means I need to learn two new tools (as well as how testing works in Angular). It is complicated for someone who is not used to testing at all.
If you are going to be doing something a lot (capitalizing the first letter in your example), then I think writing the filter does save you in the long run. Writing the filter doesn't seem worth it when you project is small. When you project gets big, and there are little one off jQuery statements everywhere, it gets unmanageable.
The filter allows you to look at your template and immediately know why that word is being capitalized. With jQuery, a year from now you won't remember why/how it is being capitalized, and you'll be grepping for ids and class names.
Obviously jQuery/Backbone setups have their place, but to claim that AngularJS makes you less effective is absurd.
Of course, we're talking about some size of application here. If you just want to make a todo list, jQuery is fine. But when dealing with a potentially huge codebase, it is good to enforce practices.
Here's an example from Miško Hevery's session on Angular.js at Google I/O:
https://github.com/mhevery/ng-google-io/blob/demo/app/script...
He displayed the equivalent jQuery code side-by-side and the difference was dramatic (spoiler: jQuery was more code).
Furthermore, my experience has been the opposite of yours - I find myself writing far less glue/boilerplate code with angular.
Please educate yourself on the way discussions are conducted here.