Yes, I've run into issues with things running differently in an async environment (dev) and a sync environment (prod). To mitigate the issue I now throw events

Yes, I've run into issues with things running differently in an async environment (dev) and a sync environment (prod). To mitigate the issue I now throw events at key points in initialization and wait for those events to continue. Has solved my problem so far. Using r.js in development isn't the worst idea. It's worth seeing how long it takes in order to make that decision. Compiling tpls is much faster (grunt-contrib-jst) and adding that to your grunt watch & including it directly is a good way to save time. I think it takes a long time on my end due to the complexity of the dependencies. I only include exactly what each module needs so some dependencies may be as many as 6 levels deep, or more (haven't really checked). SPDY makes a big difference for me (big enough to ignore the problem for now) and I don't mind using a self-signed cert in dev. EDIT: I hadn't been compiling tpls using JST in dev until I wrote this post - a great side effect is, it actually shows me now where the errors in my tpls are! Previously any tpl's stack terminated at the code that ajaxed in the tpl. This is far better for debugging and brought my DOMReady time down to about 1.75s.