Yes I've been "doing my research." I've done everything but write an entire app in React, but I only have so much time.

I don't see Angular great either, for what it's worth, so please don't think that I'm holding Angular up as a "better" solution. Both are heavy in the wrong ways. I got roped into using Angular because of its popularity, but I'm actively looking for a more solid and optimized replacement. React should be exciting to me as an option, but the more I read about it, the more wrong it feels. I just listened to a couple of the React creators on a podcast, for instance, and what they were saying about cross-platform development in the podcast is just demonstrably wrong. Source: I've been writing cross-platform apps for 20 years (mobile for the last 8 years or so).

As for Angular 2.0: I'm reserving judgment on that until it stabilizes, though it looks better.

I'm personally at least partly on the fence about whether the HTML template Really Should Be Separate, to be honest. My first exposure to Polymer was at 0.5, and the way that Polymer did things seemed profoundly wrong as well. I haven't tried again with Polymer 1.0, but I feel like using Polymer and React with all of their standard idioms will make an app less flexible rather than more. And React performance on mobile simply isn't good enough for complex apps [1]; for sufficiently simple apps, why should I even care what framework I use? Even back when Zuckerberg was claiming that HTML5 apps couldn't perform at native speed, Sencha showed them that, yes, they can, if they're done right. [2]

Where I still feel uncomfortable about spreading HTML into all the components, embedded in the JavaScript that instantiates them, is that it feels entirely too much like what people did with OOP when taking it to extremes. You end up with objects calling objects calling objects calling virtual functions calling whatever...and unless you've got a debugger open and you're stepping through the code as it runs, it's almost impossible to actually reason about the code, or even to understand how it all hooks together, unless you understand the entire execution path.

With HTML templates, you can look and see the overall app layout -- what goes where, how the hierarchy is shaped, what components are being instantiated, etc. -- without having to run the app and call up a DOM tree to see what really happened. When you embed the HTML in components, and those components rely on other components, you pretty much need to run the app and step through everything to see what gets instantiated where, and then you need to dig through the code to understand why.

To me it resonates as a "bad code smell." [3] I've been cranking out code for thirty years now, so I've got a certain amount of experience with code. And I'm still willing to admit that my gut reaction may be wrong, but I may have to write an app in that style to see if it confirms my bias, or if it actually feels OK in practice. It wouldn't be the first time I'd changed my opinion on a topic (see: OOP above, which I was one of the worst abusers of at one time).

I think that there is a place for isolated web components, but that the place is for things like the Google Map Component, or any component with nontrivial complexity like that, that really needs to be developed in isolation and/or is intended to be used in unrelated projects, and isn't expecting to be styled based on a global stylesheet. For self-contained complexity in components, the component idea is great, and for that why not use the web standard?

CSS being done in React-JavaScript for basically all components strikes me as a misfeature. First, it breaks the syntax for anyone who's done styling before (in a way that, for instance, SCSS doesn't). Second, it limits you in what styling tools you can use: There are tons of tools like Compass, Bourbon, and Susy that add useful styling functionality to your apps, and using React you've cut yourself off from such support (or waiting for React plug-ins to be created). Third, when styling is isolated to a particular group of files, you can drop in a different group of files and restyle your app.

P.S. I'm creating these various Walls Of Text in part because I'm trying to solidify my own thoughts on the matter. Feel free to ignore if what I've said doesn't hold any value for you, but writing it does hold value for me. Thanks for your comments.

[1] https://aerotwist.com/blog/react-plus-performance-equals-wha...

[2] https://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell