[tieTYT]

> It seems that a simple yeoman/grunt setup that just preprocesses some HTML and JS takes... a very long time.

I have not experienced this. I built a 15k+ line CoffeeScript app. Every time a file changed it would compile it to JS and run thousands of unit tests in ~1 second.

As for the clean NPM... I never deleted that directory. I believe I read an article somewhere that you should actually commit your module dir. Maybe that's no longer in vogue though?