Sorry to be the party pooper here, but what Meteor really needs is a consistent strategy.
In the last years, there’s been so much growth and change, and not everything was managed well. Things like MeteorPad just disappearing overnight, taking a huge amount of code samples with it.
Same story with Velocity. First, announcing it as the official testing framework, then unceremoniously dumping it in favor of a half baked homemade implementation in Meteor 1.3.
Similarly, Iron Router was supposed to be the “official” standard, suddenly, now it’s FlowRouter, which is arguably worse.
Now, Blaze is being downgraded to a “community supported” project (in other words, “we don’t have money to spend on this”). Is Meteor just going to be another backend solution for building React/Angular apps? If so, what’s the point? If it’s just about those two frameworks, why would I even choose Meteor in the future?
MDG has worked so hard to build momentum for this project, and now that it finally has gained some traction, it feels like it’s just about to evaporate into a cloud of “me too” buzzwords. Which is sad, because there are some really cool things about it.
When I first started working with Meteor in 2014, it’s strengths were simplicity, (somewhat) consistency and ease of getting started.
With Meteor 1.3, it seems to be trying to appeal more to enterprises and React/Angular lemmings. Gone is the ease of use (using another view layer requires installing extra packages and a significant amount of setup). Gone is the simplicity, instead of just getting started, you now have to decide between Blaze, Angular, and React. Soon, we’ll have support for other DBs, and then there will be even more choices to make. Sure, some of you will say “but it’s backwards compatible, so you can still use it the ‘old way’.” — Sure, but that’s getting increasingly buried under all the new efforts to make it appeal to big enterprises.
Just my 2 cents.