If you are willing to consider a different direction entirely, I'm working on a little library for simple, declarative AJAX:

http://intercoolerjs.org/

We do away with the client side model and complexity entirely and use partial HTML updates to get a better UX.

It isn't right for everything, but it is orders of magnitude simpler than Angular and it allows you to reuse many of the perf tuning tools we've developed over the last decade of web development.