I ran into a similar issue with data bindings on table cells. My solution was to keep a track of the cells in a service (later refactored into a directive), and then have the directive update the cells directly when they needed to be updated, rather than each cell listening for if it should be updated. Indeed this is more like jquery and less like angular, but with so many databindings it was necessary.
Large grids were rendered using jQuery's DOM methods. The data-flow was made explicit, and the view was updated whenever any change was needed.
React embraces the explicitness of data flow instead of watching the objects in the background. This is done using `setState`, which queues up a re-render of the virtual dom.
