I'm growing less convinced that React is good at those kind of real-time things. Not when combined with all the crap it brings.

I don't recall if I've looked at Backbone before, but I'm guessing not - I just scanned the getting started stuff and it looks like the right kind of simple. I mean, the tinytext single page 800px website design is shite, but the explanations/philosophy/etc of Backbone suggest someone that knows what they're doing. I'm definitely going to have a play with it later.

It's kind of minimal, and very unopinionated, which is why we like it – it can fit in nicely with existing projects, and you can use just the parts you like (we mostly just use the Models and Views).