[wycats]

You're not alone! The Ember core team broadly agrees with this goal.

With Octane, we focused on landing broad ergonomic improvements in a compatible release of Ember.

At the same time, we've been working on updating the way that Ember builds JavaScript so that it can make better use of tree shaking and code splitting tools in modern bundlers. That project is called Embroider[1] and it currently builds substantial Ember codebases.

Wrapping up Embroider and shipping it by default is a substantial part of the work we have planned for 2020[2].

Also, now that Octane idioms fully replace the need for Ember's original object model (designed in 2012!), I would expect it to become an optional feature, meant to be used primarily as a transition path. When combined with tree shaking, that should substantially change the default byte size of Ember.

It's too early to say exactly how that will shake out (no pun intended), but it's a big priority for the Ember community next year.

[1]: https://github.com/embroider-build/embroider

[2]: https://github.com/emberjs/rfcs/blob/2018-2019-roadmap/text/...