[wvenable]

I'm an experienced web developer but most of my projects were started a decade ago. I decided to use all modern tools and techniques for a very small (think two database tables) application. It had to work on mobile and have a good UI.

And on my god, the tools, so many tools. And so much boilerplate. And so much plumbing. I've spent only 50% of my time so far doing actual coding and the remaining 50% configuring tools, pulling down packages, pulling down tools which install other packages, and so on.

Now I will fully admit, the tools are very cool and the results are good but it still feels a bit ridiculous.

[simplify]

I feel your pain; try this starter project I created in response https://github.com/mindeavor/node-catapult . It only has three dependencies, yet it gives you a starting point to "npm install" in any direction you need (in the front end too, since browserify lets you require npm modules).