[kurtfunai]

If that's working for you - fantastic. It seems like the way that you're looking to build products is focused on development ease & minimizing JS usage. We also build products that way at my company, and it allows us to build & iterate quickly with few developers.

If you'd like to implement some modern front-end technologies that lend themselves to this style, you could look to Vue.js (https://vuejs.org/) paired with a technology like Turbolinks or Turbograft (which allows for partial page refreshment).

It allows you to build something that feels more dynamic but still is based in Rails/ERB templates.