Absolutely, I made a comment making a similar point when they hit 1.0
The Meteor marketing team seems to want to entrench themselves in every naive tech company they can and I can't believe that there could be so many Meteor users here with enough experience to comment so stridently on it.
My experience with Meteor was that my current company hired someone (who is/was literally writing a book on Meteor) to be the lead dev and they built a whole dashboard application in Meteor.
I arrived 6 months later and began working with them on that application and another Express app that they flat-out refused to touch.
I found that though Meteor was easy to pickup and figure out at a surface level, that it got very complex very fast when you started down the path of making a large application with lots of moving parts. Performance was terrible and there were always strange quirks and assumptions that Meteor would make that needed to be worked around later (one instance was their use of random string _ids in mongo which weren't valid ObjectIds).
Meteor tries to do everything for you and when you want to do something different, you have to go find some esoteric knowledge to hack around some core architecture or pattern. They don't play well with others and any questions or criticisms I had for this Meteor evangelist usually resulted in abstract arguments that boiled down to me needing to change my entire way of thinking about web apps to work with it effectively.
One of my arguments was "hey, where are all the other meteor devs? what happens if you leave or get hit by a bus?" which was also deflected somehow or made to sound ridiculous...
4 months later they leave to start their own consulting company and try to get themselves hired as an outside consultant for whatever rate.
I rewrote the entire application with a MEAN stack in 6 weeks with more features, better performance and a decoupled architecture and we've never looked back.
Admiral Ackbar would recognize Meteor for what it truly is... but unless you've got a Jedi or 2 on your team you'll want to be double and triple checking your needs before moving forward with Meteor.
Sorry you had a bad experience with the developer.
However, there is no such thing as the "Meteor marketing team". Meteor doesn't employ any marketing people (yet). Anyone talking enthusiastically about Meteor is just genuinely excited about it.
I'm curious to hear specific examples of esoteric concepts that you had a tough time with. In my experience, Meteor is the opposite of esoteric and actually very easy to work with, even as application complexity increases. If you can outline your issues, maybe we can try to address them. Thanks!
I didn't have a bad experience with the developer so much as my company did. They paid the person for a years worth of development that was scrapped because it was in an esoteric framework.
DDP is an esoteric concept, the idea of mini-mongo is an esoteric concept. And the tough time I had with them was in understanding why it was important for our application and how I was supposed to accomplish certain things within the construct.
Here's another example, we had the need to allow users to upload a zipped folder of web content which would then be unzipped to a location on the file system that was acting as our "cdn" until that location was an actual CDN.
Everything about accomplishing this was an enormous headache because it had to be done the "meteor-way" and it wasn't even a dogmatic thing (like some people are about the "angular way")... we literally had to do everything the Meteor way because it's isomorphic and you can't isolate anything outside of it without tremendous pain.
Another example of Meteor problems? How about when it upgraded to 0.9 and I couldn't run `meteor --version` without it trying to automagically upgrade to 0.9, which was a version that broke all a bunch of the 3rd party meteor plugins we were dependent on. We had to essentially just pray that our production application didn't spontaneously upgrade itself and embarrass our company during a fund-raising round.
You can apologize all you want and blame whatever on this particular dev and/or a naive implementation; but the truth is that Meteor over extends itself with its blatant self promotion and cares more about getting entrenching itself in the startup/web-development zeitgeist and than it does on actually being a useful tool.
The Meteor marketing team seems to want to entrench themselves in every naive tech company they can and I can't believe that there could be so many Meteor users here with enough experience to comment so stridently on it.
My experience with Meteor was that my current company hired someone (who is/was literally writing a book on Meteor) to be the lead dev and they built a whole dashboard application in Meteor.
I arrived 6 months later and began working with them on that application and another Express app that they flat-out refused to touch.
I found that though Meteor was easy to pickup and figure out at a surface level, that it got very complex very fast when you started down the path of making a large application with lots of moving parts. Performance was terrible and there were always strange quirks and assumptions that Meteor would make that needed to be worked around later (one instance was their use of random string _ids in mongo which weren't valid ObjectIds).
Meteor tries to do everything for you and when you want to do something different, you have to go find some esoteric knowledge to hack around some core architecture or pattern. They don't play well with others and any questions or criticisms I had for this Meteor evangelist usually resulted in abstract arguments that boiled down to me needing to change my entire way of thinking about web apps to work with it effectively.
One of my arguments was "hey, where are all the other meteor devs? what happens if you leave or get hit by a bus?" which was also deflected somehow or made to sound ridiculous...
4 months later they leave to start their own consulting company and try to get themselves hired as an outside consultant for whatever rate.
I rewrote the entire application with a MEAN stack in 6 weeks with more features, better performance and a decoupled architecture and we've never looked back.
Admiral Ackbar would recognize Meteor for what it truly is... but unless you've got a Jedi or 2 on your team you'll want to be double and triple checking your needs before moving forward with Meteor.
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