"You don't have to understand DI to use it. I know I didn't."
LOL...me neither. I also don't get how someone could do anything beyond "Hello World" and not use DI as it seems to be pretty integral to how Angular works.
I know we use Angular with RequireJS in a few of our apps. We require in all of our libraries (jQuery, Bootstrap and Angular) before creating the application module.
We haven't found speed to be a problem yet. We used to use CanJS, and I can tell you that handling the same amount of data, Angular is faster, even with fairly complicated filters in place.
I do agree that Angular requires you to let go of the "jQuery way" of approaching DOM manipulation, which throws jQuery-coders for a loop. It's a downside not to be able to plop in a jQuery plugin. Then again, considering some of the plugins I've encountered, that might not be a complete loss. Also, the Angular-UI team is doing a heck of a job of replicating the most common plugins as Angular native directives.
LOL...me neither. I also don't get how someone could do anything beyond "Hello World" and not use DI as it seems to be pretty integral to how Angular works.