It used to be like this, but throughout this year in preparation for the 1.0 release the devs really stepped it up. The official guides are good nowadays.

Neither good SO answers nor docs emerge out of thin air. If you find the right way to do something, document it, write it down, submit a PR.

I've found quite the opposite. Ember docs are very clear, constantly being refined and tweaked, and the core devs are actually willing to take input to improve upon them.

Ember creators cleary did not know where they were heading when they began writing it.

AngularJS was influenced by Flex and Spry( the creator worked at Adobe ) from the start, and still is.

Ember was heavily influenced by Sproutcore

Ember WAS Sproutcore, Sproutcore 2.0 is what became Ember.

Worth noting: Sproutcore was used to build iCloud, apparently.

that's what I thought, so clearly Ember wasn't written from Scratch

The ember docs have improved immensely over the past few months - they're currently significantly better than the angular docs.

To be fair it's the same with angular.