Please Preserve Iron Router & Blaze

Having just completed my first Iron to FlowRouter conversion, I figured I would share my opinion on the two frameworks for Meteor. Having used FlowRouter with React, I was expecting a similarly great experience when I converted my data. Blaze Layout, in my opinion, is not nearly as intuitive as how Iron Router manages to load Templates. Having to subscribe at the template level and then requiring a subscription file that handles global subscriptions creates a lot more work than Iron Router’s model. I think this reflects the overall shift from the Meteor community into trying to be technically advanced while leaving behind a lot of the ease of use that helped grow the platform. Now some of this may be rooted in trying to make a more scalable platform. That’s fine, but I don’t understand why sacrifice what made Meteor so easy to pick up and use.

React, considering its Facebook roots, is very good at rendering dynamic content that is constantly in flux. This is great if you are trying to manage multiple processes, but when you are dealing with a more static site it overly complicates mundane tasks. What I would like to see is more support for Iron Router and Blaze in the future. While they are not perfect, they certainly have a strong use case, over trying to get everyone to move towards Flow Router and React. I don’t think this requires a schism similar to Node, only supporting two different ways of working that both benefits from Meteor’s infrastructure.