I am always conflicted about writing about Angular on a negative light because the team has put some great work into it while raising the bar in how rich apps could be built on the web. Being a back-end developer for a long time, it let me build some great interfaces on the front-end really quickly, and I'm very thankful for that.

But we should also learn from where Angular succeeded and where it failed. Making XML declarative is fraught with difficulties. Things like ng-repeat are but a thin declarative veneer over the fundamentally imperative nature of constructing views. The biggest difference between most existing templating frameworks and React is in this world view: is the view constructed imperatively, or is it declared?

The other question of contention is how much implicit magic should the framework supply vs how much explicitness the user should bring into the code. Angular's design decision is to make bindings work magically, while React identifies explicitness as a virtue.

Having used both, I'm liking the imperative+explict camp.