They're not, depending on how much experience and understanding of Javascript you have it can be a painful experience. In my opinion, I've experienced AngularJs in a few projects, the learning curve was a bit longer then I expected but the community helped me a lot, plus there's lot's of tutorials and also, you don't need to learn everything and it's not that big in comparision with Backbonejs that depends on Underscore, jQuery or ZeptoJs, etc.

On SailsJs I tried for a bit, but all the NodeJs frameworks are in a different league, so I think you shouldn't really compare them.

Some tips, there's this website called echojs.com (like hacker news for the js world), there's also frontendmasters.com with really good learning resources for a small monthly fee from experts all around the world.

I've been working as a Full Stack Developer for a long time and now decided to do just front end development and I couldn't be happier with the state of tools we have nowadays, specially for debugging: Chrome, Firefox, etc. For example, have you checked the new Firefox feature that allows you to get the list of event listeners attached to a DOM element ? That's sick! What about remote javascript debugging ?

In the end of the day, maybe javascript is not for you or you need some more time.

The new kid on the block is famo.us! Have a look!