That's reassuring. I look at some of the code examples and all the $vars and it looks very obscure. I guess the forthcoming 2.0 version is supposed to simplify things a lot and make it play nicely with web components though so maybe it's worth getting on board now.
To contrast with what the OP said, I found Angular pretty cool at the beginning but got more and more annoyed as I progressed. If you're okay with interacting with a black box, go for it otherwise choose react.
This is a distinct possibility, and I did run into one or two of these situations already. In my case, digging slightly into Angular's internals for workarounds was relatively successful.
An example is Angular's treatment of HTML forms and input elements, w.r.t. things that you'd expect, such as name / id interpolation (namely: Angular doesn't interpolate dynamic form names as you'd expect - [1] and [2]). In cases like this, digging into the internals to resolve the initial surprise and later solve the problem was slightly frustrating.
