I think Yehudas point was, why do you want to have just the minimal functionality when you are constantly grabbing for Backbone Addons just to do the standard stuff.

Having a plugable architecture is great, but if rails never considered making a good thing standard (think bundler, or sprockets) really makes moving between rails apps so much easier.

For example I would say nested views, and view layouts is something that should be standard - isn't backbone built for the single page web app idea?

I have seen so many different layout managers, region managers etc.