You use this argument a lot, but the ranter suggests that the reason many turn to Backbone is because of a self-selecting bias of it being the most popular.
It's certainly my favorite argument. Folks sometimes forget that pre-Backbone, there was a cornucopia of rich JavaScript framework options: YUI, SproutCore, Dojo, EXTjs, UkiJS, JavaScriptMVC, Cappuccino, and so on. If Backbone has become a bit popular over the last couple years, perhaps it's because it tries to do less than the excellent pre-existing alternatives.
there is something to be said about flocking to a framework purely based on popularity, Rails is a great example of that too, you sure as hell don't need it for most projects but there are a lot of developers familiar with it, whether it's good or not is another thing
