It drives me nuts. I spend probably 1/5 of my time doing front-end (but have been around through all of the generations you mention) and after re-org after re-o

It drives me nuts. I spend probably 1/5 of my time doing front-end (but have been around through all of the generations you mention) and after re-org after re-org I've finally settled on a build system with a Makefile and browserify to package things up that isn't an enormous monstrosity of 1000 different node packages and bajillion-step build progress. Frankly, I think that a large part the problems in front-end have to do with how hard it is to write maintainable JS w/ a proper separation of responsibilities, due to the way JS files are loaded/have no coherent module system (on the front-end that is). Because there is no standard module system (and yes I know about CommonJS and AMD loaders, but both have issues), to use a given component you oftentimes have to adapt an entire philosophy of package management that can lock you out of other packaging philosophies. In the end, we have millions of front-end programmers saying, "eh it seems like to much work to integrate this packaging philosophy, I'll just write my own duplicate copy/library." So basically projects silo themselves off and share little code until someone decides on yet another package philosophy (see: http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/). People love to write build system after build system, in every field, a fetish I've never quite understood. Makefiles build some of the most widely used/complicated packages out there. And as a final note, I'm really excited about emscripten in allowing front-end developers to move away from designing abstractions around JS/DOM in such a way that eventually we can stop relying on JS and rely on more the same primitives we use everywhere else in programming.