I didn't have a bad experience with the developer so much as my company did. They paid the person for a years worth of development that was scrapped because it was in an esoteric framework.
DDP is an esoteric concept, the idea of mini-mongo is an esoteric concept. And the tough time I had with them was in understanding why it was important for our application and how I was supposed to accomplish certain things within the construct.
Here's another example, we had the need to allow users to upload a zipped folder of web content which would then be unzipped to a location on the file system that was acting as our "cdn" until that location was an actual CDN.
Everything about accomplishing this was an enormous headache because it had to be done the "meteor-way" and it wasn't even a dogmatic thing (like some people are about the "angular way")... we literally had to do everything the Meteor way because it's isomorphic and you can't isolate anything outside of it without tremendous pain.
Another example of Meteor problems? How about when it upgraded to 0.9 and I couldn't run `meteor --version` without it trying to automagically upgrade to 0.9, which was a version that broke all a bunch of the 3rd party meteor plugins we were dependent on. We had to essentially just pray that our production application didn't spontaneously upgrade itself and embarrass our company during a fund-raising round.
You can apologize all you want and blame whatever on this particular dev and/or a naive implementation; but the truth is that Meteor over extends itself with its blatant self promotion and cares more about getting entrenching itself in the startup/web-development zeitgeist and than it does on actually being a useful tool.