I am working on this as I learn AngularJS - https://github.com/manojlds/EventBase
Working with Firebase has been fun, but security is hard. AngularFire is not really mature yet, too.
Working with Firebase has been fun, but security is hard. AngularFire is not really mature yet, too.
I am running into this issue as well, I kind of wish I had written my own firebase service instead of using theirs because (Especially in the 0.2 release) I was seeing the app re-draw a ton of times due to the way that angularFire was loading the data. That and a bunch of little inconsistencies, like when creating an angularFireCollection you can optionally pass in a callback as the second parameter that returns your data, great if you want to assign it all at once instead of each "child_added" being fired but the object it returns is the same as is returned from a ref.once() call (As can be seen in the code for angularFireCollection) and for that not only do you need to call .val() on what is passed in to get the value but it is not an angularFireCollection, it is just Firebase data and so it rather useless as the binding does not work and you can't call the angularFireCollection methods on the returned data (like .add()).
Please don't get me wrong, AngularJS is awesome and Firebase is really cool but there is learning curve and as you said angularFire isn't really mature yet. That said I am very impressed with the work being done on angularFire (and speed) so hopefully it will shape up nicely.