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You are _completely_ missing the point of frontend applications, here's a few to get you started:

- Ease of creating complex user flows.

- Decentralization of application work: app runs on client, less CPU cycles for my server!

- Separation of concerns: API does one thing, client application does another, there is a bright red line between the two.

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You can build complex user flows with JavaScript on top of server rendered views. Ajax works great with server side rendering, see Pjax https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax or Intercooler http://intercoolerjs.org/

The server is rendering JSON anyway, more or less just as expensive to serve HTML. Besides, the bottleneck is usually database access.

It's a false separation and forces you to expose far more than necessary. It's nice to have my full database available on every page render without needing to define explicit endpoints.

I also like having forms generated from database models.

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