Is DDP or Meteor really needed though? Couldn't you easily set this up with RethinkDB using its Changefeeds killer feature for real-time + socket.io along with whatever other library/frameworks you want to use without ever touching Meteor?
curl https://install.meteor.com/ | sh
so much quicker (in the short term and long term) than reading a myriad of tutorials and then bashing my head against this configuration of several products for multiple weeks to get what Meteor provides as part of a single maintained and updated system.
(I work at Meteor)
I think the main benefit of Meteor is not that it's impossible to do what it does with other libraries/frameworks, but how easy it makes those things for you.