I haven't heard of mithril until I read this thread but I think I might give it a try. I've only just picked up angular to build a form app served from a node server that communicates with good old soap services. I've kept the soap stuff on the node server so that the angular stuff is relatively light but still find it pretty heavy handed.

I'd be quite keen to look at either refactoring to use mithril or react, so will check you blog post - thanks!