[verroq]

There is just a lot of friction. Want es6, get ready to put gulp in your work flow. Want to sanely include frontend dependencies? Time to add throw in bower. Want those js/css to be injected into the page? Throw in wiredep or bite the bullet and chuck in the wirepack.conf.js. Don't want that and want to use a skeleton? Install yeoman and run the isomorphic js generatior that gives you a 1k+ line project and you haven't even made your app yet.

[TheAceOfHearts]

I made a scaffold [0] that tries to give you a reasonable starting point, without tons of extra cruft. It was important to me that the scaffold handle all 3 basic environments: development, testing, and production.

It's basically a single webpack config (that's heavily commented, btw!) and a set of npm run-scripts. You don't need gulp to build an application! And I would not call bower a sane way to include frontend dependencies... Not by a long shot.

[0] https://github.com/cesarandreu/web-app

[quicksnap]

I was looking at this a while ago, and it's a really nice starting point! I too am aiming to remove Gulp from my workflow when possible.

[Gigablah]

It's like people want complexity in their app, then complain when they get it.

[lewisl9029]

jspm can actually remove a lot of the friction you mentioned:

1. seamless ES6 transpilation at runtime (no build steps needed)

2. load libraries in any package format as ES6 modules (Globals, CommonJS, AMD, ES6) from any source (local repo, Github, NPM)

3. no need for injection (you can import css and html programmatically using extensions)

It does introduce some friction of its own due to it being a relatively new project, but not enough to offset all the benefits it brings, in my experience.