You raise valid points about Angular's complexity and lack of documentation.
This is why I also mentioned knockout.js
Knockout is more explicit than Angular, it's well documented, and the tutorials are just amazing.
I used to be in the "dynamic" crowd, but now I'm starting to lean towards the "explicit is better than implicit" philosophy, so I'm somewhat torn between Angular and Knockout. I'm choosing angular - like you said - for the low barrier of entry but if it turns out to be complicated I will probably switch to Knockout.js
However, I don't see any reason why I should use Backbone. What exactly does it provide? I don't see it providing anything useful to me.
I can only speak of my personal experience with these tools, and I've only tinkered with knockout (though we do use it for one of our tools internally, and the developer of that project gave it glowing reviews). I would recommend using the tool that is the closest to your development style.
If you like opinionated frameworks that make it as easy as possible to do the most common tasks (like rails), maybe you'd enjoy something like ember.js (or knockout). For me the style closest to home is the ability to plug in My Favorite Solution to each particular problem as it arises.
A primary offering from backbone then is a simple structure for plugging all these previously disparate tools together, the serverside corollary to this is something like python's Flask or ruby's Sinatra where it comes with only a simple routing base and ways to plug your own components in.
Want to use your own templating library? Easy. Want to use your custom persistence style? No problem. Backbone isn't going to make these choices for you, you will need to make them yourself.
This may or may not be the right choice for you, just investigate and make the choice that makes the most sense for you !
This is why I also mentioned knockout.js
Knockout is more explicit than Angular, it's well documented, and the tutorials are just amazing.
I used to be in the "dynamic" crowd, but now I'm starting to lean towards the "explicit is better than implicit" philosophy, so I'm somewhat torn between Angular and Knockout. I'm choosing angular - like you said - for the low barrier of entry but if it turns out to be complicated I will probably switch to Knockout.js
However, I don't see any reason why I should use Backbone. What exactly does it provide? I don't see it providing anything useful to me.