If you're going to be building or maintaining apps in JavaScript, it's absolutely worth your time to learn tools like Backbone, Angular, Ember, or something els

If you're going to be building or maintaining apps in JavaScript, it's absolutely worth your time to learn tools like Backbone, Angular, Ember, or something else in that vein. If you're more concerned with building a business, the optimization criteria are different. Your priority should be building the business - or at least building enough of the business that you can start acquiring customers and pitching to investors. That gets you runway, market leverage, knowledge of what you should be building to acquire and keep customers. You can worry about implementation details like tech stack after the business exists. Worrying about it before you know the business is even valid is premature optimization. You are orders of magnitude more likely to fail because you don't start than because you chose the "wrong" tools.