thank you for your question.

you have a point. I still see that it is very valuable to provide tooling, documentation and conventions for this toolchain since more and more people use it but every project you see on HN/github/… looks a bit different.

I believe these kinds of opinionated conventions you know from other frameworks really add benefit. So I think there are quite some backbone users who intentionally chose backbone because it does not dictate as much as other client side frameworks do, but there are also many people who want to use backbone and coffeescript and would love to have an easer getting started experience :)

interesting topic.