(OP here) This was definitely a bad choice on our part (my part, as I'm the one who made the decision originally). It was super simple to get started with AngularJS, and I had a fair bit of experience with it. Part of the motivation for this post is to tell other developers in a similar position (who have used AngularJS/Ember/etc. in the past and are starting on a new project) that they should consider server-side generated pages as well, even though they are often considered old-fashioned.

Thank you for sharing your experience, and i hope that this post teach people a lesson about context (e.j: in your case you were using the wrong tool for certain context), consider that either serve-side or client-side rendering are not competing to each other to claim which better, it always "depends" on the context that they are implemented and lastly that server-side redering is not something that should be percieve as "old-fashioned", there is a duality between the two techniques that address specifics problems and is our job to choose what is best for the job.

Hey OP! We did the same EXACT thing as you. Our end user experience was super slick using Angular, but this doesn't bode well for things that, well, aren't users (we migrated back to Rails). Your post looks like it got HN-hugged so I can't read the whole thing. Either way I'd be happy to share (so we can compare/contrast) our own findings and conclusions via email. As you said, educating other developers is great!

I'm well-versed in Angular, and I too made that mistake on one project as well. There's something to be said for picking the right tools for the right job.