[mgutz]

For rich JavaScript app I find Backbone underwhelming. There's too much wiring up to do and as you say you might as well bind events and actions directly. If you've written richer desktop like apps before than Backbone is nothing new. It's more for the people who use HTML and Javascript without much thought to structure, dare I say the vast majority of jQuery users.

Backbone's advantage over normal javascript objects is Backbone provides events when objects and collections change. I dislike how Backbone achieves that through force use of set() and get() as property accessors. I prefer KnockoutJS models as they look and behave like plain old javascript objects, i.e. you don't have to call model.toJSON() to use a model as an argument for a plain object.