Can someone please point out what are the differences between these two directives and also when should each one of them be used
ion-nav-view should be used a base for your apps navigation and is an abstract view.
http://ionicframework.com/docs/api/directive/ionNavView/
ion-view is the nested view that you can navigate to.
http://ionicframework.com/docs/api/directive/ionView/
Obviously, I’ve been using it wrong 
I would add a ion-nav-view in all templates just to be able to change the animation type; but this caused a bunch of other problems.
Now that i switched all ion-nav-views into ion-view, navigation works properly but I have no means to specify what type of transition I want for that specific page.
How do i do that with ion-view?
Right now this isn’t easily possible, but we have some stuff in work to enable this 