Thanks @jistjoalal for your 2c, makes at a lot of sense to me, and along the lines of my thinking. Can you elaborate on your point about the Meteor age concern.
Thanks @jkuester on your comments, and sorry for my indication of your work being messy, that was not the intention at all, on the contrary your work seems very well done, and I am looking forward to your progress, but I dont understand why it has not been done ages ago…?
I think there is a strong point for my consideration to expect maturity in this part of the arena. I guess you are right, I am looking for something which is not there.
Well I’m pretty new to the web dev world, but Meteor doesn’t seem to me the most stable platform. If Rails is a train, Meteor is a rocket. We’re not that good at making rockets w/ a long lifespan yet 
But if you need to get somewhere in a hurry, rockets are indeed fast.
I read the K&R C book (2nd edition says 1988) and that code still compiles on my modern machine. I read a blog post from 2016 about how to do something in Meteor, and the code just never works. Sometimes it doesn’t even look relevant to how Meteor works now.
It could just be how much Javascript has changed since Meteor was created. I’m new so I maybe I just can’t translate the code.
The main problem is packages. Outdated packages or dependencies that seem to have been the perfect solution only a few years ago are soul crushing
Care to share said piece of code? Because our experience, and that of many Meteor users in this community, is that the library is actually rock solid.
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Like I said, it’s probably more a problem of being a noob and the JS world changing so fast.
I took Andrew Mead’s Udemy course and created the additional challenge for myself of not using his specified package versions, but the latest, and then reading docs to get it working. It took forever. React Router had completely changed since the course came out. Almost every video in the course has comments from students facing version problems.
My honest opinion is that it’s not easy to keep up-to-date with the JS world, and it doesn’t seem that stable. I guess it’s just lack of experience.
Thank you for the encouragement, the forums are a big reason for me choosing Meteor for some of my own projects.
I appreciate that you are still in the process of learning, but then it might be too early for you to say that “Meteor doesn’t seem to me the most stable platform”. You see what I mean? 
Since we are talking about how unstable the JS world feels (and admittedly it is), Meteor is one of the most stable and backwards compatible JavaScript frameworks. I had it run some of our old code, wrote in the 0.x era. If you want peace of mind, you hardly have a more reliable choice.
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I use Pure css for a few form components and then build everything bigger myself using flexbox.
I’m a huge fan of Semantic-UI React. Been using it for the past two years here and find it to be exceptionally stable.
I’m using Bulma for CSS - clicking on a button is still handled by my app JS code - ie: opening / closing a dropdown menu.
I use Material UI too. It’s beautiful.
I use material-ui as well, as well as their styling component. This is react, however.
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I write all my customized styles using styled-components.
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@njbuch no offense taken, I am just curious about any critics on my projects 
I think this has not been started since there was no bootstrap 4 at the time when Blaze was still the major frontend framework for Meteor. And bs3 was not event finished. Then React and Angular came to the stage and brought some of these component frameworks.
I do this now with Blaze Bs4 because I still use Blaze in my projects for the next 2-3 years.
me2, unless if it is really technical. then i sometimes use material ui.
styled-components and material-ui are both great, because you can add it to the project without messing with the rest of your app.
try adding bootstrap to a existing app without breaking the style somewhere…
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FWIW, if you’re open to working with VueJS, I found this starter using Vue + Buefy (Vue Components with Bulma CSS) + Meteor to be super effective for helping me get up and running: https://github.com/JorgenVatle/Vue-Meteor-Starter
My earlier code was based on Blaze + ViewModel and I was really indecisive for a while on abandoning Blaze, but realized that Blaze doesn’t have the performance or community support to justify long-term investment of time and energy.
Working with Vue (esp with Single Page Components) is a lot like working with Blaze, except that its really fast, and you have tons of ecosystem support. It helped that I’d standardized on Bulma as my preferred FE UI framework, but having Buefy wired up with Vue was absolutely a breeze, esp as it gives you some awesome widgets out-of-the-box. I was able to refactor my entire codebase to Vue from Blaze in a week, and I could continue using my server-side logic as that didn’t change. The only tricky part was getting Auth to work with Vuex but that was sorted in a day.
What really took this to another level was when I paired this with https://github.com/Herteby/grapher-vue, which lets you use Grapher as your query interface (you can literally create publications/methods on-the-fly) and to perform relational lookups across collections ala GraphQL. Setting up exposures and links is a one-time effort, and after that most of my code is in FE since I define my lookup queries in my Vue components.
I’m not writing any publication code (I’ve refactored this part of the server codebase as I can have control over what’s queryable in the exposure firewall in Grapher but still build publications on-demand), and I only have methods mainly for mutations/data modification, and lookups from 3rd party services.
Hope this helps.
I recently just got rid of frontend frameworks for my more “sustainable” apps. Nothing but JQuery. Very refreshing.
You could see how I made it:
$ npm install -g maka-cli
$ maka create VanillaApp --client=vanilla
You said what?!?! 
I should caveat that with “Nothing but ES6 and JQuery!”
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