As a brief aside, ng-if is probably what you mean to use - it actually removes the other node. But every single one of your other points is absolutely true, and we've run far away from Angular for similar reasons. I'm having a lot of fun with React (with Backbone-based stores), and it just feels right after all of that. It feels as easy as working with Rails templates again, but everything just magically stays up to date, and the performant way to do things is the only way to do things.