[johntdaly]

I’m not trying to be mean here but the rough experiences you are having with jQuery are not really going to go away with React. I would also not call anything a SPA without a solid router and honestly I doubt the jQuery app has that.

Even if you don’t want to use one of the larger frameworks like Angular or Ember I would still recommend doing a couple of tutorials to see how they construct things. Any app needs an architecture and you are more likely to get a feel for that with something larger like Angular or Ember.

Alternatively find something that can teach you about front end architecture. An SPA is more than a router, views/components and state management (and libs and service objects). Look around a bit to figure out how you want to architect things and what concepts exist.