Just went to your archive to see if you'd written it yet. I'm pretty interested in seeing what you have to say because I too have had trouble understanding Ember.
By the way, don't blog archives usually link to the posts? ;)
OP here - this post is almost a year old and I don't know why it got pushed to HN again. It's taken a year :) but I think I've come to finally understand Ember... and I very much like it.
I think Ember made a big mistake with the router. The most interesting part of Ember IMHO is the data-binding and the components. With those two things you could do very complicated document-centric desktop-like apps very easily.
If you wanted to make a web app resembling Adobe Illustrator, I have no doubt that Ember is better for the task that any other framework. In fact I did something in that vein which, sadly is an internal tool, using a pre-router version of Ember.
Then the router came along around 1.0, and it make everything too complicated. As the OP says, for desktop-like apps routing makes no sense. Also all the levels of indirection and abstraction makes no sense. I'd like at least to have the option to expose objects globally as I please. What I want is one, maybe two global models and a lot of components that have access to those globals. End of rant.
I also don't really get ember. I've currently been going through my experiences with angular (daemon.co.za/2014/03/wrong-to-be-afraid-of-angular/), but I just have grave misgivings about ember as a concept.
Backbone was interesting because of how little assumptions it makes of you.
Angular was interesting because it made some pretty reasonable base assumptions and then gave you this whole new sandbox to play in.
Ember just feels to me like the kind of framework that you are going to spend a lot of time trying to appease.
That might be an unfair assessment, but I am also not likely to ever build anything with it because I really loathe handlebars, and it doesn't do anything new or interesting enough for me to care.
