[bjw181]

React and postgres are great. I think you already have a solid stack with just those two. React offers a lot of what a large framework can eliminating a lot of the fluff things like Angular seems to include. That being said, I don't use frameworks and code in pure TS -> JS these days and borrow things a specific project needs from more popular frameworks, tweaking it for what I need.

Meteor is good for prototyping and getting something up fast. I find it very amateurish and highly abstracted. If you're a green developer, you aren't going to learn anything using Meteor. Also, I believe support for this framework is dying. Its highly, "Meteor's way or the highway"

Express is more just glue between your front end and your server/backend that uses Node as its adhesive. Its pretty great for eliminating a lot of boilerplate you would otherwise run into.

[swtf]

Depends on how advanced you want your routing to be I can see going with the from scratch rout, but that means you'll need to spend time writing unit tests..

You might as well fork and delete/modify a bunch of code.