Take it with a grain of salt…everyone’s experience is certainly different and these are just my thoughts and opinions in a general sense, not direct.

Meteor does come across as a “do-it-all-for-you” and “just add a package to do that no coding required” kind of framework at first glance which has its ups and downs…it grabs new people that want to learn to code because it looks relatively easy and friendly, and yet scares off hardcore Node/C++ devs that are used to writing the complete TCP socket server with SSL support from scratch for a Todo list app, or newbies want to learn but don’t want to pay money to buy a book for an open source framework which is 90% of the getting-started level learning resources out there so they try and wing it or copy code from StackExchange that worked with v0.8.4 and then wonder why it doesn’t work…well that’s how I envisage most newcomers may see it…and thats a shame…

However used with that attitude of simpleness, especially for a larger project it isn’t going to render the desired results…Meteor can be as simple and/or complex as you want it to be, you can still access the underlying parts of Node and NPM modules you would use in a MEAN stack or you can use what works and is ready for you, you can even make your own solution to a problem, you can use it without its reactivity with server side rendering if you were that way inclined…its really up-to you. If you want you can dig into the inner workings or you can use it and design a UI with pretty buttons and fancy plugins that do stuff with 3 lines of code or somewhere in-between…

At the end of the day there is still a large learning curve (which I think maybe you considered should take a lot less time than it does) and lots of trial and error and its a *very different* way of thinking when programming too which a lot of programmers would probably get frustrated with at first coming from other languages/frameworks…I’ve spent a few years working with Meteor now and still learning new ways to do things.

And just to add so its not biased or seen as a “Meteor is awesome” reply, yes of course there are downsides and things I dislike about it, but those downsides considered, i’d still use Meteor time and again purely from a development speed POV…but thats just the way the cookie crumbles…

And purely for a bit of context and reference my main Meteor application uses 1 database, 11 separate Meteor applications talking to each other, 2 iOS apps (with additional MFi hardware) all combined together with 11 internal packages including external DDP clients in .NET for windows, REST APIs and GoLang applications for file uploading and S3 support interfacing with it too all with single command deployment to servers and totally modular…now I am only one programmer and have written it all myself from scratch in about 6 months…I couldn’t even imagine how long it would take to write similar in another framework…but each to their own.