Wow, looking at those 7 principles I’ve to say MDG delivered and held their ground!
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That may actually be true. But the main part that did some damage is that they didn’t really communicate that they were going to do this properly, and people found out through the tutorial, which I believe it was a bad decision to make a “my first Meteor project” tutorial that is focused on experienced users, rather than actual new users (as the tutorial section implies).
Up until that point of the React thing, Meteor was actually gaining in popularity super fast. There’s some graphs around somewhere in old topics that showed growth start declining around the periods I mention. The graphs were constantly moving up until they became neutral around the time period I mention, with the first drops ever happening around the time of the few months following 1.3 release.
I remember this because I mentioned in a post around then, you would think with the NPM support, it would be a time for improvement, but it seemed to be the opposite. It seems that the discontent with the changes 1.3 brought did more damage than it actually brought in new users - at least at that time.
(Edit: Found it!: https://forums.meteor.com/uploads/short-url/nOUp5meWfX1RgOIPXqJJfkcHgHY.png - Now the thing to note on this graph, the part where that dip started dropping? IIRC, that was the month directly following the release of 1.3 - that should have been a period for growth with NPM finally opening, but it actually DROPPED. The only negative thing that happened at this point was what I mentioend earlier - the tutorials changed, NPM support required refactors we were not made aware of beforehand, and people began to question the direction of Meteor, without any solid answers that had anything reassuring about the future. The answers - such as focusing on Apollo or moving completely to NPM or removing backwrads compatibility, only led to more worry since they could not commit to saying anything.)
This is also, coincidentally, when the “Meteor is Dying” posts started appearing.
We can say the reason for the growth to slow down may have been anything, but I doubt it is a coincidence that the community turned from heavily positive to negative around this time, and that just so happens to be when growth started to slow.
You can also see me mention this change when returning to the forums - The State Of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong
Yes! That is exactly it.
I think those 7 principles are great, and those are the exact reasons I became interested in Meteor.
But during the times I mentioned in my post, they quietly removed that from their marketing. Some of them still remain, but some (such as simplicity equals productivity) were completely removed.
Once it was discovered that they removed this from the pages, at the time of worry in the community, it did no good to alleviate peoples worries. It seemed like Meteor might have been changing directions at that time to something people did not want, because I don’t know a single person who uses Meteor that did not support those 7 principles.
I completely agree with you that Meteor adoption got a hit when it was going through the changes last two years or so. I was concerned as well, I had two apps running on blaze and didn’t know what was going on. However what I come to appreciate later is that these changes from MDG were logical, important and for the better to ensure that meteor stays relevant in the coming years. So short term pain for a long term gain.
I for one has been using many of the NPM packages and react libraries and that was allowed by the changes MDG introduced, had they not made those changes, I’d probably be looking for something else by now. I mean NPM was and still growing exponentially and now it’s the biggest software repository ever, why would Meteor developers re-invent the wheel? And this is fully aligned with their principle of embracing the ecosystem instead of competing with it.
Overall in my opinion Meteor needed better communication strategy during those changes and it needs better marketing nowadays, but from a technical standpoint the changes were all to the better.
The good thing is that those uncertain times are behind us and 1.5 is on the way 
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Yep… communication was the #1 issue. They have not “ruined” the software itself as the fears suspected may happen. But with proper communication, most of that worry could have been alleviated from the beginning. At least tell users what they should be expecting before it happens, so it doesnt catch users off guard!
And returning to some proper new user tutorials, and saving “thorough best practice” tutorials for the Meteor guide, would go very far in helping establish some growth again!
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deployment is the most easy deployment on any app takes less than 1mn to setup and deploy the app to any hosting from AWS to Rackspace!
Please help us spread the word about Meteor 1.5, we are going to do a lot of that in the coming weeks as well!
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you’ll need to spend more on marketing and some ads a little bit 
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My main app is deployed to Galaxy, but for future apps, I am wondering what you use to deploy that makes it so easy?
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