Backbone source is insanly easy to read , and it's short. Angular's on the other hand ... but that's the price to pay for it's features.

I would not call Angular magic. Basically there is a "loop", the digest cycle , whereas in Backbone you would add Backbone components to your code.

AngularJS creator worked at Adobe on Flex , and Adobe in fact attempted to create a "AngularJS" for non developers bundled with Dreamweaver ( Spry framework , but databinding was only one way).

I like AngularJS but since i dont do form centric apps ( more reactive documents with a lot of animations,svg or canvas) i went with Ractive + Backbone. Ractive is easier to learn and to use.

But AngularJS is pretty RAD when you have a lot of forms ( an admin panel ,etc ...), and provides a big testing plateform too.

    >   To me it's a bit like the JavaScript version of Drupal

hmm yeah maybe , drupal hooks are a bit like backbone directives in spirit.