Assuming that Bocoup simply chose Backbone.js for familiarity's sake
The tone of this post seems a bit dishonest.
There are plenty obvious reasons for not choosing Ember today: It's young, it's not production-ready, it's undocumented.
In that light I don't think you can reasonably expect anyone who's not a former SproutCore-user to choose Ember over Backbone today.
Case in point: The docs don't even mention the Em.ArrayController that your example builds on. How is anyone without prior SproutCore-knowledge supposed to discover it?
Well, to your point: I wasn't a Sproutcore user before, and I've read lots of articles on Backbone over the last 3-4 months, and tried to get it working a few times for my projects, without much luck.
That said, I'm not an expert Javascript developer, so maybe I just didn't understand it, or try hard enough. The following story is mine, so YMMV.
Then I saw Ember.js and the Handlebars bindings made simple sense to me, so I cloned the repo, and started playing around with it.
Sure it's not documented but I know how to load the uncompressed source tree in Textmate and look around. The source code itself is very well commented and contains inline examples (although some of them are still Sproutcore-centric, but s/SC/Ember/ and you're mostly good).
I read through the examples, I tinkered, and within a few hours, I had a semi-working version of my project.
So yeah it's young and undocumented, but if anything the ease with which I was able to get up and running on it says a lot for its future potential.
The tone of this post seems a bit dishonest.
There are plenty obvious reasons for not choosing Ember today: It's young, it's not production-ready, it's undocumented.
In that light I don't think you can reasonably expect anyone who's not a former SproutCore-user to choose Ember over Backbone today.
Case in point: The docs don't even mention the Em.ArrayController that your example builds on. How is anyone without prior SproutCore-knowledge supposed to discover it?