When a user opens a page that has a bunch of required fields, all they see is a bunch of red. Not very inviting. I would much rather that validation is hidden until $touched === true. I would also like to have the ability to control when validation is shown.

I appreciate how helpful angular-material is, but I really like that bootstrap allows me to specify when to show validation errors by requiring me to add the has-error class myself. This gives me a lot of flexibility.

I haven't looked at the implementation for angular-material, but perhaps I could specify a function which would determine whether validation should be visible for a specific field?

However it's done, I just don't want to invite users to my page with a bunch of invalid fields. Let them touch the fields first, then we'll tell them it's invalid if it still is after they've had a chance to do something with it.