i get you on vi. i was there (3000 years ago ;-), although only at the tail end of it in the early 90s. i switched from emacs to vi because of my sysadmin job.

i am really curious what you make of aurelia once you take it apart. please ping me if it is not to much trouble. i discovered aurelia when angularjs 1 was being redeveloped into angular 2. rob eisenberg was invited to the angular team based on his work on durandal but when his ideas were not accepted he left again and built aurelia instead. aurelia is not perfect either, but it was way better than angular 2 or vue at the time.

on your mobx example, you are right, aurelia doesn't track everything. it may be able to handle some level of complexity but i certainly had situations where i had to explicitly send a signal to get aurelia to update values.