Angular ui-router: ui-views vs directives?

How about if you used Angular UI router's inline views to point to directives?

Let's say you have a directive for a table that handles CRUD operations on user accounts. We'll say the directive is named user-admin. Our routes file would look like:

.state('users', {
  url: '/users',
  template: "<user-admin>"
});

This would give you many nice things:

• Allow you to have a url that points straight to a directive
• Removes the duplication of needing two templates (view template and directive template) when a state is just a directive
• Allow you to start moving more controller logic into directives in prep for Angular 2.0. See here and here.

After some thinking/ correspondence, here's my conclusion:

ui-views define containers, and states define what goes in those containers

When you put a ui-view='containerName' directive on an element, you're setting up a container that holds something. You haven't yet said anything about what goes in there.

When you create your $stateProvider.state(...) definitions, you're specifying what goes in these containers:

$stateProvider.state('someState', {
  views: {
    "containerName": { templateUrl: "someContents.html" /* , controller: ... */ },
    "container2": { templateUrl: "otherContents.html" /* , controller: ... */ }
  }
})

Can you use all the traditional directive functionality (transclude, replace, isolate scoping, compile/linking functions) with your ui-views? I'm not sure. For example:

$stateProvider.state('someState', {
  views: {
    "containerName": { 
              templateUrl: "someContents.html",
              scope: { localVar: "@" },  // can you
              transclude: true,          // do this?
              controller: function(){}
    },
    "container2": { templateUrl: "otherContents.html" /* , controller: ... */ }
  }
})

In conclusion, it seems like each option has its tradeoffs. Directives have some additional features, yet ui-views are interchangeable and can have routes associated.