Item #4 on your list simply isn’t true. I’m no sysadmin and I’ve had no problems hosting meteor on Heroku, Modulus, OpenShift and even AWS. Sure it’s not ‘meteor deploy’ but in many cases it is just as easy.

Ultimately if you have a dedicated team doing the server component, Angular might be easier for some UI devs to work on, only because concerns are more separated. This is typical in a large team for an established product. React is also a fine choice for this and really if you think about it Blaze is also fine for this. What’s happening is that Angular ‘forces’ the separation, whereas Blaze and to some extent React do not — which if you don’t define roles and architecture, could lead to one dev feeling overwhelmed.

It would be interesting to see if this stigma attached to Meteor could be alleviated by the Meteor team officially separating the server component from the client component with separate installers, tools, etc. They could keep the current setup as a RAD framework and have a “migration” script that would convert to the full stack platform.

Definitely thanks for sharing though, always good to hear about people’s experiences.