Anyone got an opinion?

Pointless.

Yeah it does kind of seem like it. Only axing cause I'm looking at angular 2, which uses it by default. Angular 2 is stupid overkill for 99% of any projects I might get involved with anytime soon, but shiny! Anyhoo you can allegedly also use bog-standard js, so mebbe it is pointless.

Never liked Angular - it doesn't smell right.

We're going with React, though I've yet to do anything meaningful enough (and free from bad implementation choices of others) to know if I'd recommend it yet.

Read this the other day
 

I used angular 1x for several projects. It's not too hard once you get your head wrapped around it. But I realized I could do most of what I needed with jquery, and the angular build environment is too complicated for what I need (e.g., you need node, npm, and a bunch of other libraries), so I dropped it.

You'll appreciate this...

  https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f

 LMAO  :-((

That's partly why we're sticking with good old Backbone/jQuery/Underscore at my job. Keepin it simple, plus the kind of stuff we make doesn't really need the real-time kind of things React is good at.

I'm growing less convinced that React is good at those kind of real-time things. Not when combined with all the crap it brings.

I don't recall if I've looked at Backbone before, but I'm guessing not - I just scanned the getting started stuff and it looks like the right kind of simple. I mean, the tinytext single page 800px website design is shite, but the explanations/philosophy/etc of Backbone suggest someone that knows what they're doing. I'm definitely going to have a play with it later.

It's kind of minimal, and very unopinionated, which is why we like it – it can fit in nicely with existing projects, and you can use just the parts you like (we mostly just use the Models and Views).