Take a look at Mithril. People are frequently surprised by its small learning curve (and for many, the majority of the learning is for knowledge that you can go and apply outside of Mithril)
Funny. But the "will fix everything" mentality is ironically why most frameworks are hard to evaluate and learn.
For learning, what you really want is a small set of new concepts to learn that easily map to things you are already familiar with, good documentation to refer to, and a active community that can answer your questions within a couple of minutes. That's why I mentioned Mithril.
To give him credit, the thing that is appealing about it is that there is very little to it that's not javascript. So you can very easily expect to figure out everything you need to know about it in a day or two, vs however long it take to familiarize yourself with one of these massive new frameworks.
Lately I've been helping to maintain a sizeable open source app that someone else wrote in Mithril with MSX: https://github.com/ScienceCommons/www and I have to agree that the learning curve has been very gentle. It's every bit as powerful as Angular but it feels so much more like writing vanilla JS with a lightweight MVC structure to it. It keeps the code easy to understand and maintain.
I'm using Mithril because of how easy it is to look over the source. I didn't want to have another framework with a huge learning curve (even for senior devs) like Angular. It's well documented, and you can read the entire Mithril source and understand what it's doing within a few hours. That means I don't have to bother training people on it. I can give any new people the API and a link to the source and they should be able to contribute within days.
I haven't heard of mithril until I read this thread but I think I might give it a try. I've only just picked up angular to build a form app served from a node server that communicates with good old soap services. I've kept the soap stuff on the node server so that the angular stuff is relatively light but still find it pretty heavy handed.
I'd be quite keen to look at either refactoring to use mithril or react, so will check you blog post - thanks!
