Angular 1.x is complicated and kludgy, IMO. It's not bad but it had a steep learning curve. Angular 2.0 should alleviate those problems. I've been using Aurelia a bit here and there and like it a lot. I think Aurelia's rigid, opinionated structure is clearer and succinct than Angular's more "framework" approach.

IMO angular is bloated and I absolutely despise using their weird template markup.

why angular? because once you understand the framework it's totally RAD. You can build complex applications in a matter of hours , and you don't even have to think about the app architecture , everything has to be in a certain place. AngularJS comes with a lot of battery included and for every task there is an angular module.

Why not angular ? hmm i'd say , the angular team fucked up with version 2.x announcement. I personally don't like this atScript/Typescript thing ,It's no longer safe to begin an angular project that will have to be maintained for years as devs don't really know if angular 1.x will still be maintained by Google 2,3,4,5 years from now.

With 1.x if you were into jQuery plugins, you could easily include them into any angular project which makes development really easy. You don't need to write classes or stuff like that, just write a function , put a bit of markup into the HTML and voila, you have a functional angularJS app.

I'm still using angularjs because it's just the best MVC framework out there.React isn't a framework but a view engine. React doesn't solve any architectural problem other than the view.

I understand people's distaste for Angular, but it often really is the best solution.