Really well put, Allen. I agree with everything you’re saying! It’s important in the long term that application development isn’t something restricted to the small set of people who can wrap their head around the 57 different tools you need to learn to build something state of the art these days.

For Meteor to be a viable business and a widely used platform, we do need to appeal to people who can pay for our products and evangelize the stack in the short term. But I hope that doesn’t stop us from always keeping in mind the places where there is unnecessary complexity for new developers and fixing that stuff when we get the chance.

My dream is that by expanding into the wider JavaScript ecosystem, we can bring some of the thoughtful design from the early days of Meteor to the best-practice tools of today, like React, Angular 2, NPM, and others. Perhaps that way we can make something that is accessible, powerful, and flexible at the same time — but it won’t happen overnight.