For Minification, Brian Ford's ngmin grunt task works perfectly. The OP says they haven't tried it which to me suggests that they may not be using grunt at all, which is a mistake. Grunt takes care of a lot of workflow and deployment details, including minification, and should be part of every javascript developers toolset regardless of whether or not they use Angular.js.

For the "Directives are never 'done'" issue you should be able to attach any jQuery plugins to the DOM in question inside the directive compile function.