[lastofus]

I have the same feelings about "modern" JS development.

Knockout.js is worth checking out. It can be picked up in a day or so, and can be integrated into existing sites easily.

I actually started down the road of learning Backbone/Marionette to work on an existing codebase, and I'm liking what I see overall. It offers models that can sync up to your backend easily, and adds much needed structure to handlebar templates and jQuery.

If you feel like using React, it looks like it would be quite easy to use Backbone models in the same way Flux implementations are used (basically a data store w/ events). I might try this down the road as I like React but want to avoid CommonJS/ES6 and whatever the Flux lib du jour is.