I'm keeping my eye on Meteor. As it stands I don't feel that anything in the Node ecosystem compares to the daily ease-of-use I find in my Rails environment (and I know Rails isn't exactly a peach). I like that you guys seem to be trying to do some things different, the fact that you're not using NPM could also be considered a boon rather than a defect. I'm not sure I how much I like NPM, but I'm arguably not a Node expect.