This requires joins. Mongo doesn't have joins, and Meteor doesn't even have fake joins, like Mongoose's 'populate'. There has been a lot written in the Meteor community about faking joins, as it is a persistent problem. First, I tried template helpers, but these are impossible to put into a nested template.

I looked at 5 different open source packages for serverside fake joins, but ended up doing a clientside solution (to get a feel for the 'basic' way to do things). This solution involved several functions on the clientside router, that would be called several times, with different data available each time. It is a convoluted thing to do, no matter the method.

Another thing I tried to do was purely clientside databinding, to populate the author badge in real time as the user fills a form. It's trivial to bind data to the database and have that update in realtime, but I wanted to hold off saving anything until the user hit the save button. Again, a simple task got weird. I ended up using an un-synced database collection, then saving to an identical, but synced collection.

I'm not writing off Meteor completely, but I ended up moving away from it. Node.js and a solid frontend framework have slightly more boilerplate, but are generally very flexible for whatever it is you want to do. In retrospect, one of the best things about Meteor is the one-line auth setup. This is usually a big pain, and it was nice to have it be so easy.