Hey everyone,
I think it is a fair question to ask ourself do we really need Webpack or should we go with pure Meteor? Why should we use such a complex tool while we have something great that is simple to use.
To be honest, when I wrote the Webpack plugin for Meteor it was out of my own need to use it on a major project. It wouldn’t be as near as useful if it was a small project and as someone developing 100% React with Meteor, it was REALLY helpful for fast hot reloading, building assets (most people here don’t know this but it rocks) and code splitting.
The good news here is most people only care about fast hot reloading. And as a matter of fact I know it can be as fast with Meteor 1.3 because the hot-reloading of React is not built on top of Webpack but on top of Babel (hey! meteor use this we’re lucky 
). It has already been done for Browserify, why not Meteor build?
If we add HMR to Meteor, we will be able to do exactly the same fast hot reloading than Webpack. Then, you wouldn’t need to use the complex Webpack config files unless you have a major project that needs a complex configuration.
I think this is the future of Meteor and I’m hoping the community will be happy to go there. I wish I had more time to contribute to this.