I think there are only a handful of people in the world who truly understand what building something on the level of complexity of a 280 Slides or GMail in jQue

I think there are only a handful of people in the world who truly understand what building something on the level of complexity of a 280 Slides or GMail in jQuery really is. And I think even those people would agree that they'd be better off with a more structured framework, even if that was something built on top of / in conjunction with jQuery. In some ways I think that's where Backbone is trying to fit itself into the ecosystem. I think one of the fundamental realizations of building something complex that's fast and maintainable is that using the DOM as your source of application state is usually not the right way to do it.