It's a bit sad for the front-end JS community that despite using one of the most comprehensive client frameworks in Ember.js, the author of this admin panel still felt the need to swap in a non-native data plugin (http://epf.io/).
What does non-native mean here? All of the persistence options for Ember (Ember Data, Ember Model, EPF) very intentionally don't come bundled in Ember core. Not sure what you're trying to point out here.
That's because the said data framework is still far from being production ready and complete. I fail to see why it is a sad thing. It is actually good for the Ember ecosystem that other options are available even when the core team is forced to distribute efforts on all fronts, leading to a slowly evolving data library.
