Hmm, I see why it could feel like that but I don't really agree. Here's another angle: Would you rather learn some (hopefully) very well worked-out library wit

Hmm, I see why it could feel like that but I don't really agree. Here's another angle: Would you rather learn some (hopefully) very well worked-out library with good documentation and all the edge-cases slaved over, with multiple contributors, with Stack Overflow questions about it ... or, would you like to learn some random guy's non-library library, because he was scared of libraries, so he just made up a load of ad-hoc conventions in his codebase. I'd rather learn to use Backbone, Angular and Ember, than have to deal with big-ball of mud code based on no library in particular. Same goes for templating libraries, I'd rather learn a handful (after all they're relatively trivial to use), than come to a codebase that uses none at all.