I played around with meteor yesterday and I have mixed feelings. First of all, I was impressed that the whole plaform (it is not just a framework but an end-to-end development platform for all devices and browsers that matter because of the power of JavaScript). It worked out of the box on my Windows machine and it deployed out of the box to the site (http://happy2016.meteor.com/).
I watched some videos about meteor and I like their bottom line of bringing to the world what Facebook and Google have been hiding from us for their revenue. Fast interactive (reactive) web technologies.
There are a few things that make me skeptical as to whether meteor is the future. First of all, do we really want to code in Javascript? I have found debugging a minor application to be a nightmare, even with Chrome developer tools. Hot code pushing and “optimistic UI” may be neat, but it really isn’t all that elegant or robust. I like the integration of angular and node, but I’m not sure about MongoDB. I needed a random record (my bad, I’m still thinking in SQL-records with primary and secundary keys rather than in document collections) and it was pretty tricky (but of course Stackoverflow helped me out).
I normally pick a platform for its clout and the amount of contributed modules/plugins. That’s why I used Drupal back in 2011 and switched to WordPress more recently. PHP, I know.
On Atmosphere.js there are some good projects available, but many are buggy and better not used in a production environment. Eventually, the success of meteor and similar platforms will hinge on how easy it is to deploy an app.