I didn't mean to imply I thought promises are the same as callback hell - they are completely different beasts, indeed. But I still greatly prefer the reactive

I didn't mean to imply I thought promises are the same as callback hell - they are completely different beasts, indeed. But I still greatly prefer the reactive system provided by Blaze and Meteor's overall setup. I've built reasonably complex apps with Meteor that have required no promise chaining, and no callback nesting. They're more readable, easier to maintain, and cause fewer bugs. One of the reasons why I greatly prefer Meteor now, because all of those things mean that I get to do more of what I enjoy: building cool stuff. I'm not sure why you're claiming Backbone isn't an MVC framework. It was pretty much designed to be MVC or at least MVVM, and checking the Backbone website, it still says it pretty much in the first paragraph: models, collections, and views. That's fine, but I like Meteor because it doesn't need the MVC crutch to provide structure and elegance. Somehow, it gives me more power as a developer without also asking me to write the kind of boilerplate code normally associated with data binding, getter/setters, models, and things like event emitters. If you still prefer Backbone, that's great! But I just wanted to explain to the OP that for me, Meteor is about getting rid of spaghetti code, not adding to it.