Well, my thinking is, if Angular decided that doing thing's "the AngularJS way" was such a bad idea they did a rewrite, I don't see why I should be beholden to it now. So far, I've found I don't need a controller. Just need to make sure I can get things out of Angular's DI container nicely and I'm golden. Only real frustration so far is that there's no built-in way to inject an ES module into the backoffice.