I think it was a huge mistake to announce Angular 2.0 so long before its release date. In the open source world, you should aim to release the product BEFORE you even announce its existence, not the other way around!
When you release first, you get valuable feedback from early adopters and you get an opportunity to add finishing touches without upsetting too many users.
When you announce first, you are effectively labeling your current release as stale/outdated and no one wants to build a new project on legacy technology!
As for AngularJS itself; I think it's fine structurally. I don't find it too 'monolithic' - I think it strikes a good balance.
You could use something more modular (single purpose) like React, but then you'd end up building a whole custom framework on top of it (made up of a large range of small libraries) to handle things like routing and data/validation layer, etc... Is using your own custom framework (made up of so many small <and potentially less than compatible> open source components) really better than using a single cohesive solution which is maintained externally (for free) by the open source community?
When you release first, you get valuable feedback from early adopters and you get an opportunity to add finishing touches without upsetting too many users.
When you announce first, you are effectively labeling your current release as stale/outdated and no one wants to build a new project on legacy technology!
As for AngularJS itself; I think it's fine structurally. I don't find it too 'monolithic' - I think it strikes a good balance.
You could use something more modular (single purpose) like React, but then you'd end up building a whole custom framework on top of it (made up of a large range of small libraries) to handle things like routing and data/validation layer, etc... Is using your own custom framework (made up of so many small <and potentially less than compatible> open source components) really better than using a single cohesive solution which is maintained externally (for free) by the open source community?