This isn't exactly the question you asked, but I recently accepted that client-side applications are the future and spent some time with Ember (which as a Rails developer I wanted to like) and AngularJS (about which I was skeptical because it looked like nothing I'd seen before).
After two weeks in each, only AngularJS was paying off (I got architectural and productivity benefits in return for the time I spent learning all those framework things which seem arbitrary at first) so I stopped looking at Ember and haven't looked back.
Same boat as you. I wanted to like Ember; everything on paper looked great. But with Angular, things just clicked and have allowed me to be more productive than ever.
I would advise both of you to give Ember another chance!
I like to think of things as lying a spectrum: On one end, you have completely hand-rolled framework-less JavaScript. This requires no learning curve whatsoever, but things may get slow and messy as time progresses and you miss out on the cumulative benefits of a framework. At the other end of the spectrum is something like Ember, which takes a while to learn is is just plain overkill for small projects, but which for big projects starts to pay dividends in the long run.
After two weeks in each, only AngularJS was paying off (I got architectural and productivity benefits in return for the time I spent learning all those framework things which seem arbitrary at first) so I stopped looking at Ember and haven't looked back.