Not at all, these discussions are useful. I think React and Ractive actually handle this in a similar way - Ractive maintains a 'parallel DOM' (which is basical

Not at all, these discussions are useful. I think React and Ractive actually handle this in a similar way - Ractive maintains a 'parallel DOM' (which is basically the result of populating the parsed HTML template with data), and items within the parallel DOM are responsible for updating the real DOM as and when necessary. So both React and Ractive are concerned with doing the least amount of DOM manipulation possible.