I've been reading Discover Meteor. So far, the book's been very helpful, and Meteor itself has been jaw-dropping in terms of how if works.

I'm excited to see what the future of Meteor and Meteor-like frameworks hold.

Yeah, I've been super happy since switching to it. Javascript still has it's ugly warts, but overall I think time to develop apps has dropped dramatically!

Predictions on how quickly adoption grows after 1.0?

I think it will be a pretty sizeable jump (100% growth?). I expect the next 0.8 release will make a lot of noise when they leave Handlebars behind and really ramp up the rendering engine side of things.

Yea, I need some jade or haml, as the current packages are brittle as f#%k.

Asset ordering for packages is another important issue I'd like to see rolled out for 1.0.

In terms of growth, who knows, right now it appears to be linear, but I feel a ramp up is coming.

Interesting, we haven't really run into big asset ordering issues, we tend to stick jquery plugins and libraries in /lib or /client/lib

Yea, I wouldn't call them big either, but they happen none-the-less. For package developers it can be vital. Sometimes A must be loaded for B. It's mainly a third party javascript issue. The compatibility folder sometimes does the trick, but by contrast the same utility doesn't exist for package developers. It's a larger dependancy management issue not tackled by the current packaging system.

Yeah, the current packaging system is more of a download installer and less of a dependency management system. That should get a lot better in 1.0. As for Jade, https://atmosphere.meteor.com/package/jade-handlebars is working towards this. It also appears that Meteor is (or was) thinking of integrating Jade support in Meteor directly: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/jade