It looks like the concerns are different between Backbone and Flight. Flight is for building UI components, not client views. I think it might be akin to jquer

It looks like the concerns are different between Backbone and Flight. Flight is for building UI components, not client views. I think it might be akin to jquery widget plugins, but with more structure to make it easier and potentially more extensible (eg the mixins). So yeah, in this case I think they were right to ride on DOM events.