I agree, strongly.  Lately, I&#x27;ve been involved in the shift from server-side MVC with a sprinkling of javascript to web services API with javascript based front end.  I&#x27;m inclined to to with rails-api, and probably Ember on the front end, but it&#x27;s a moving target, and I tend to agree with people who say this has led to a very complicated stack with too much duplication (routing on front and back end, and so forth).  But should I use React, Angular?  Should I write the backend in node?  My current guess that the trend toward &quot;isomorphic&quot; systems will probably resolve this, but again, that&#x27;s just a guess.<p>What can I say?  There is a tremendous amount of reading, trying, cursing, debugging, evaluating, forecasting what will be valuable later.  Some of it is churn, true, and it is unnecessarily complex, but what isn&#x27;t? (tax law, anyone?)  Simplifying things is in itself a huge organizational, social, and mental challenge.  All in all, it&#x27;s pushed me past the edge of my abilities, and I constantly feel very ordinary in this field.