My 2 cents. I personally prefer pure HTML views, an entirely angular front end along with a Web API/EF/SQL Server back end, basically no Razor. Razor is an abstraction to help programmers render HTML, these days everyone’s coming to the conclusion that removing these abstractions is a better idea, hence the evolution of ASP.NET from web forms, to MVC etc. It’s not really difficult for developers to get to grips with HTML and use an angular front end, moreover this makes UI designers jobs easier, they have pure HTML and JSON/Javascript, they don’t need to go about understanding MVC, Razor, controllers and actions. We used to work completely on MVC, in our latest project we moved to a Web API back end and an angular front end, and we’ve noticed that our UI designer’s productivity has vastly improved.