The cool thing about Angular is that it introduces a pretty unique way of building applications. What people don't seem to get is that it isn't mutually exclusive with jQuery. You can use Angular and still pull in the full jQuery library for your directives. What you'll find, however, is that you don't really need much more than the jqLite library that ships with Angular. The "Angular Way" alleviates the need for the more involved DOM functions in jQuery.