I'm moving in a similar direction for similar reasons - but by shifting functionality out of the node ecosystem altogether. I recently released devd, a small, dev-focused HTTP server with build-in livereload which has taken the place of gulp livereload and node-based dev servers for many of my projects (https://github.com/cortesi/devd).

I'm now working on the next step. It's not quite ready to be announced yet, but I'm cooking up modd, a similarly focused tool for monitoring the file system and responding to changes (https://github.com/cortesi/modd). Modd has already supplanted gulp entirely for many of my use cases, and has replaced supervisor and a bunch of other tools to boot. Many of the actions triggered by modd for front-end projects are precisely invocations of npm scripts as described in the article. A few more features (desktop notifications with Growl/notify, and script access to the list of changed files), and modd will be ready for me to ask for public feedback.

Both modd and devd are small, single-purpose tools written in Go, released as statically compiled binaries with no external dependencies. I've tried to make them tight and focused, and if I get it right, they will hopefully be a refreshing change after gulp and grunt.