That's similar to my viewpoint. Stop with all the frameworks - what new, powerful functionality will it provide your users that existing things can't do (ie JQuery, raw JS)?
You eventually end up writing your own framework of sorts anyway when you take minimal path.
Angular can be quite fast compared to jQuery in an app of substance. It is not constantly reading/writing to the DOM in most cases, which saves a lot on the performance front. It is also a smaller library than jQuery, and you're not naively applying global or complicated selectors. Plugins rewritten to be pure javascript + Angular also can have a much smaller footprint & be more powerful to boot, such as the Angular UI Bootstrap project (5 KB minified & gzipped as opposed to 15-35 KB? I forget Bootstrap's js size) & contains all of the power of Angular to modify your functionality with them & more.
How do you refactor out bloat from a framework without throwing away the framework?
This is my whole point about not using frameworks. They're a siren that WILL eat you in the end.
Of course, if a framework automates a ton of functionality, it'll naturally be inappropriate for certain projects. I wouldn't try to use Angular for an HTML 5 game, for example, though there's a good chance I wouldn't use jQuery either.
I actually did use Angular for an HTML5 game last week as part of a demo for a conference. Admittedly it was a really simple game (tic tac toe), and it did use Polymer as well as angular, as sort of an experiment. But it worked pretty well, and only took about a day and a half to hack together, with realtime multiplayer and chat using socket.io.
Obviously you're going to run into things that Angular is not really ideal for, but we are trying to make it do what it does very, very well, so in the future it should be suitable for pretty much any mobile or desktop app.
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This sounds like evangelism, which is not my intent, you're absolutely right about what you're saying, but it's true, sometimes a framework works (and saves a ton of time) that you'd otherwise spend hacking together something awful. Hopefully this mithril thing also saves people a ton of time without them having to worry about numerous other issues.