This is a typical reaction from someone who hasn't used AngularJS to build a complex web app. I would strongly suggest you check out our boilerplate for building complex web apps with AngularJS, which uses Backbone for models and AngularJS for UI and data binding.

http://brandid.github.io/parse-angular-demo/

"In AngularJS, every time you visit a route, it passes an idand has to resolve it in your controllers."

- not true, just use nested controllers and prototypical inheritance to access the already resolved object

"AngularJS doesn’t follow this philosophy; it encourages you to throw away what you already had and find it again (probably from the server!)."

- not true, thats why $rootScope exists

"None of the examples or blogs I read through demonstrated how to reuse object instances, for example. Is that just not done in AngularJS?"

- not true, all scopes inherit from each other, javascript prototypical inheritance applies

"The problem is that the $watch function belongs to the $scope and NOT the Room."

- not true, you can put a $watch on the model if use Backbone for your models

"If you had an array of Room instances for example, you can’t watch them all without looping through them all constantly."

- not true, you can watch a collection of models, and you can do things like watch the length of the array for less processor intensive use of $watch