[sanderjd]

Data point: I moved from a relatively big Backbone project (utilizing some of the higher-level libraries that inevitably were built on top of it) to a bigger Angular project. I liked Backbone more, because it is simpler to reason about and much easier to debug, but I believe we build things much faster with Angular. I decry a lot of the same design in Angular that others do, but I can't argue with its productivity.

I think the productivity for me comes from two places: 1. Emphasis on isolated and reusable view components. You can certainly do this in Backbone, but I never felt like I had a satisfying pattern for it. 2. Automatic data binding in the "push" direction. That is, the direction of updating the view based on changes. I think the full bidirectional binding complicates things. I find that I have far more sinks for changes than sources, so being explicit at the sources would not be burdensome.

From my initial reading tinkering, using something like ReactJS as the view layer in a Backbone (or perhaps even plain JS) app may very well speak to both of those points.