I had the same experience. It was really hard to get a react/redux project started without a swathe of modules and build systems. It became a mission just tryin

I had the same experience. It was really hard to get a react/redux project started without a swathe of modules and build systems. It became a mission just trying to set it all up and Babel was a part of that. There appears to be no way around it to get that stack up and running. I discovered riot.js and moved to that as there was zero barrier to entry.