The phrase "hot and new" makes me think I talk to my grandfather, it's embarrassing for this particular topic. I took the example of MVC, which is - again - everything but hot or in any kind new. It took about five years (!) for DNN to support that "hottie". But I get your point, Tony. DNN has gotten a commercial platform rather than a technology you build your own ideas on. It's about the buck you can out of it, no vision, no passion. I think that can be dangerous in the long run, at least if it takes half a decade to implement something like MVC. Maybe, with all respect to the dev team, DNN is not the only thing that gets old and especially fat.

I think I need to step away from DNN as well, especially for my own projects that I have full control over. I more and more loose trust in the core development team which makes me feel sad, very sad. But hey, times of change can offer great opportunities.

I personally developed a couple of modules with MVC as template engine and WebAPI / JS / Angular (2) for user interactions. It's very possible, especially because I get sick of WebForms. Performance wise it's a lot faster if you make use of partial rendering for very complex stuff and just JSON for basic HTML client side templates. Plus it's more portable to other platforms using this approach. Yes, the support is damn terrible, but that's the reason I developed my modules with the full source code of DNN in my solution. This way I could quickly determine how it works and where to tweak it. But I think you are right if you say that this is not the way most developers do it. Just because it's the next buck they hunt after instead of implement it in a way that makes a page load fast.

Because there seems to be no "strategic" movement at DNN anymore, I currently experiment with Orachard2 (based on ASP.NET Core) and server side rendering of JS code via Node. There is a lot of potential, especially if you are going the route of a rich client like you said you wish to. But, it's simply that the API of DNN in general is much more user friendly, Orchard makes heavy use of dynamic types, so... yeah. It's a trade off that makes me visit this forum from time to time. I would be super hyped if DNN had a vision where to go, what to do and what to leave behind. But at this time, even Umbraco seems to have more on the table that gets me excited.