I am a web developer who jumped on the Angularjs bandwagon just recently. Honestly I am having trouble with the steep learning curve of AngularJS. I know if I continue at it I will grasp it but at this point I feel it will be pointless to continue learning Angularjs since Angularjs 2.0 will be completely different. I know some of you may not agree with that statement but I have limited time and I don’t want to spend countless hours learning something that will soon be irrelevant so my question is:
Can I use jQuery to handle DOM manipulation, AJAX, etc. without issue in Ionic? In other words can I use Angularjs for only the minimal boilerplate template in Ionic, and use jQuery to handle the rest? I have been researching hybrid mobile app frameworks, Onsen UI advertises that the framework does not require knowledge of Angularjs, since jQuery can be used on top of it, is the same possible with Ionic? I prefer to use Ionic if possible.
You CAN do that, however I really wouldn’t recommend it. To use Ionic, you still need to understand routing and $scope and controllers. jQuery will not provide those functions for you in an Ionic app. Once you get those down, you’re well on your way to know a good enough portion of Angular to go the rest of the way.
Thank you mhartington for referencing that post, that put a lot in perspective for me. It’s now clear that anything built Angularjs should be pure Angularjs and only use jQuery as a last resort.
The unfortunate part is that by the time I master Angularjs enough to use Ionic, Angularjs 1.0 will be on its way out and I will have to start over and learn 2.0. For developers already fluent in Angularjs this isn’t as much of an issue, but for people like me who are looking to pick up Angularjs for the first time… I feel very discouraged with 2.0 looming overhead.
So somethings to keep in mind, Angular 2.0 won’t be out for another year or so, so we will be using 1.3 for some time 
As far as the learning curve, I’ll be honest, I had little to no idea how to do things with angular. But whats funny about Ionic, is that since you have a context of what you are working in, you can learn Angular rather quickly and pick up things as you go.
Looking at examples are a great way to start.
To this day, I don’t know every aspect about Angular, but I know what I need to to be able to write an app.