My experience with Angular.js was not that good though. May be I am real dumb, I can't see anyone with similar experience. I was totally frustrated with the amount of things I had to handle to bind my backend API. And also there were several issues like $scope.variables going wild.
In short, it was a total mess in my case. I rather decided to roll out with Jquery instead.
The code got totally cluttered I accept, but Angular.js frustrated to the point that 'elegant code' was least of my concerns, I just wanted to finish it somehow and run away and never look back.
Were you mixing dom manipulation into your controllers? That can make things go haywire because they happen outside the standard compile and link phase. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Using the directives (which I admit are super confusing at first) can alleviate this issue because they are executed in the normal Angular update cycle so everything happens in the correct order.
