I think that this notion of _generality_ that meteor embraces is essentially the struggle for platform relevance. I take isobuild to mean iso-platform, one platform to rule them all. Take the discussion in the video about DDP. It's like "get on board people, we've figured it out!"
There is a tension between generalities and specifics, between abstraction and things that are concrete. I don't doubt that having a solution that satisfies everyones hopes, dreams and desires would be awesome, but I feel tension when I work on meteor apps. It feels super easy to code up demos (generalities) and then once you get into the business of building out complexity you bang into trouble. It's almost as if the underlying platforms percolate up and clamor to be heard, if you stray from that meteor happy-path.
I feel this way too sometimes, but I've come to relate it more to the fact that Meteor is relatively new, and the community has collectively built relatively few complex apps, so the documentation, available blog posts, Stack Overflow questions and answers, wikis, books, tutorials and videos just aren't really in place yet for that kind of architecture.
There are more and more solutions and patterns emerging every day as more and more people try building complex stuff in Meteor, though. Just look at some of the packages by Arunoda like fast-render, subs-manager, and kadira: all designed to ease development around common bottlenecks you run into as you start to scale up.
In other words, I think this problem will eventually go away as more people keep trying.
Just like it did with Ruby on Rails 8 years ago :)
There is a tension between generalities and specifics, between abstraction and things that are concrete. I don't doubt that having a solution that satisfies everyones hopes, dreams and desires would be awesome, but I feel tension when I work on meteor apps. It feels super easy to code up demos (generalities) and then once you get into the business of building out complexity you bang into trouble. It's almost as if the underlying platforms percolate up and clamor to be heard, if you stray from that meteor happy-path.