FYI, I actually agree with you that Angular is overly complex and has a lot of serious problems. I even wrote about my gripes with it back when Angular was still somewhat "cool" (here: http://lhorie.blogspot.ca/2013/09/things-that-suck-in-angula... and here: http://lhorie.blogspot.ca/2013/10/things-that-suck-in-angula... ), and last year, I wrote a micro-framework of my own to get away from the frustrations I was getting w/ Angular ( I talk about it here: http://lhorie.github.io/mithril-blog/lessons-learned-from-an... ).

A lot of the stuff I wrote there is still relevant.