It's sad that your colleagues' lack of open-mindedness about adopting a framework is forcing you to create a less-well-specified, less-documented, implicit framework.
We are using babel because I already got gulp into our code base and so adding babel was pretty easy to get in (also the benefits were easy to explain). While I could slide react/angular in our bower config easily I would need to document how to transition from what we have to the new JS framework. More than anything I worry about moving too fast. Getting switched from jQuery mish-mash of code (global functions and variables everywhere and everything in a doc-ready) to what I have above was a big hurdle that we still aren't over. I'm trying to ease everyone in without leaving anyone behind. I know what we are doing isn't the best approach but it's better than what we had before and will be many times easier to move to a JS framework.
As I said in the reply to the child comment it's more of a "we can't move that quick without people falling off". I'd love to adopt a JS MVC or even just something like React but it would be too much of a change. I'm trying to ease everyone in with a combination of ideas that I've pulled from various frameworks. I don't for a minute think what we are doing is the most efficient (redrawing the entire view for every little change? Terrible) or even best practice but we have to start somewhere and trust me, anything is better than what was there before. I'd love to hear ideas on a better way to accomplish this and ease the transition.