[anabranch]

Welcome to hell.

The relentless creation of new javascript frameworks never ceases to amaze. They're all over the place and every one of them claims to be a magic bullet.

My recommendation would be to choose one that is extremely stable that underlies a lot of the core principles of other systems. Backbone comes to mind because it's fairly unopinionated about how the system should be built - this makes you understand how data can be tied together, how systems can be structured (because you have to make your own choices) and which ones seems to make the most sense to you. Couple that with something like react and I, personally, think that you've covered a lot of the front-end principles.

http://yeoman.io/ is a popular flow that's much more plug and play than writing your own gruntfiles/gulpfiles.