Not really, for me it has been kind of a bonus added on top of an already great framework. So far I have really enjoyed it just for the fact that I can load a bunch of test data into Mongo and instantly see it work with my UI. However since I have read many people complain about performance and scalability in meteor I have tried to minimize the mount of database reads and reactive data I am dealing with for any one page.

The lack of free time was a big incentive for me also. I suggest at least taking the hour or so to go through the tutorial. It was very straightforward and I was able to breeze through it with little to no web developer experience, and instantly be able to use the simple concepts I learned to start working on my own project.