It looks like ng-couchbase-lite’s createDesignDocument is reformatting the JSON, or at least wrapping "views":{ … } around it, before saving it, which might be part of the confusion here. But @rickhdz showed the source of the createDesignDocument function, which doesn’t do that, so I don’t know if he’s using ng-couchbase-lite after all.
I’d have an easier time troubleshooting this if I could see the actual HTTP requests being sent to CBL, instead of trying to interpret the JS functions in my head. Is there a logging mode that can dump the requests in raw form?