The simple presence of "link" and "compile" thingies in 90% of the directives is a testament that Angular does spill its guts and is not really simple and intuitive. It annoys me to no end because in the end 95% of developers will end up copy-pasta'ing stuff from the (horrible) docs or StackOverflow without really getting it. And the thing is, they're right, they should never have to care about post-link and compile and whatnot.

I mean don't get me wrong Angular is a great framework that opened a lot of possibilities for a lot of people and I'm glad it exists but it's a strange mix of "dead simple" and "oh my god kill me now" levels of sophistication.