Creator of Sidebar here. You're right, it's not the best showcase of Meteor. The reason it's this way is because it's running on a very old fork of Telescope (http://telescopeapp.org), and I haven't had time to update it.
But you make some good points. Meteor is not for everything, and if I had known from the start that Sidebar would end up being just a list of links I might have used a different stack (like Rails, or even a static site generator).
But you make some good points. Meteor is not for everything, and if I had known from the start that Sidebar would end up being just a list of links I might have used a different stack (like Rails, or even a static site generator).