I started building small side projects with Angular 2 a few months ago and have only been doing Angular 1.3 development prior to that.

Things I love:

• Controllers are components (.component is also in 1.5)
• Lifecycle hooks (also in 1.5)
• No more scope
• Some might disagree with me here, but I honestly feel like Angular 2 from a structure standpoint felt simpler to understand than Angular 1. I'm excluding TypeScript here, but the component and modular mindset just makes more sense than controllers
• The Angular CLI is awesome. Getting a project up and running and generating components, services, etc... is beautifully simple

Some other things I want to point out:

• The release felt like a bit of a fiasco. Breaking changes with every release isn't a very pleasant way to learn a framework. At one point, adding third party libraries felt like a mission. Maybe this was an issue with the coined term 'Release Candidacy' (I feel like it honestly should have started at RC5). If they stressed that they were still in alpha, than I wouldn't have minded so much.
• TypeScript playing a major role makes me wonder if that was the best decision. Don't get me wrong, TypeScript may be great for a number of reasons. However I can't help but feel that learning it's usage + it's tooling feels like another hurdle that needs crossing, especially to someone who's never used it before. Yes I know, ES5/ES6 can be used just fine, but that still means the majority of tutorials/documentation will be written in TypeScript.

• Totally new framework, name kept for marketing purpose
• Overengineered hell
• Extra huge bundle size
• Custom language
• Gorilla-Banana problem
• Huge learning curve to master the "Angular's way". Imagine if everyone would do things like he wants
• React to Angular is like SpaceX Falcon 9 to Hindenburg

Me, as actual Angular 1.3 developer it's nice. I think, for i saw and i read about it, it's more focused on events, in make more separated concerns and make more legible the code.

For other part is under TypeScript that seems a nice language under javascript and I think some problems in Angular 1 are fixed.

It works, I'm on my third Angular2 project (been using it for close to 6 months already)

I came to the AJS game a bit late - 1.3 or 1.4 - don't remember - within the last 2 years for sure - so I'm rather upset it's changed so much from AJS 1.

I haven't looked at it much - now that it's out of beta, I may look closely, but right now I have no plans to use it on any projects.