[andrewflnr]

It's not so much the libraries themselves as the very need for all of them. I'm a fairly new front-end developer (for anything complicated, that is), and the browser as a platform can't help but feel like what it is, some good ideas with a lot of hacks and inconsistent philosophies accreted over time. It's a pain in the butt, even something like a two-column layout without tables. And that's just to get it working in one browser. Then you try your page in Firefox, and maybe it breaks in some obscure way. That's when you start breaking out the libraries, like bootstrap.

Right now, web is the best place for my app to be (assuming I can figure out offline support), but I tear my hair out every time I run into one of these issues. Just the other day I had some bizarre issue where offsetBottom and offsetTop + height were returning contradictory values, or something like that. And that was with jquery helping me. The web platform is cool for what it enables, but stinks for what it makes you do to get there.

[geuis]

What you are saying is that you are a fairly new frontend developer. Of course that list is daunting. I've been doing this stuff for years and there are projects on that list that I haven't even heard of, and one of my projects (Helium) is on the list!

The reason there are so many solutions to problems is that there are lots and lots of problems. The common stuff we all need is put into one library (eg jQuery). Some types if applications need frameworks so we get Backbone, Angular, or Ember. There's a thousand other types of micro issues that are common enough to need small, reusable solutions.

Combine all of that with hundreds of thousands of inherently creative and inventive people and we end up with multiple solutions to the same problems. Eventually we coalesce around a few of the best tools and move on to new problems.

Just pick what you need to get a job done and don't worry about trying to learn everything.

[andrewflnr]

What I need to get the job done? I can't even find a library to do 2-way CSS style binding. I would have thought that was obvious, but it looks like I'll have to do it myself. To get the experience I want I might need to do a bunch of other stuff myself too. 

I understand the forces that produce multiple solutions to problems. Maybe OP was wrong about that being evidence of a deeper problem. But a lot of the problems are deficiencies in the underlying platform. That's the real problem IMO.

[lowboy]

You only need a small set of modules, depending on your needs. Instead of a monolithic ModernWebSiteLibrary, you piece together what you need.

In your two-col example, just pick any CSS framework or grid system (Bootstrap, Foundation, Skeleton, YUI Pure, etc...) and you're done.

[bung]

Regarding column layouts, great place to start is css box-sizing property