So, it turns out that going by the responses to @neLrivVK&#x27;s question that this opinion of yours is in not in any way controversial. In fact I think it would be a great topic to have a poll about but first we&#x27;d need to agree on what to put in the poll :) Straw poll suggests that at least 50% say, &quot;stay the course but tweak knowledge&quot;.<p>Of the tech that the OP listed two things are _not_ hipster.js front end libraries or frameworks, and I wish I had mentioned them in my other response below.<p>1) Bootstrap: This is a huge productivity boost for CSS. You get a responsive layouts, a standard way to do grid layouts and it papers over browser differences and compensates for older browsers. OP says they don&#x27;t use much CSS, that really doesn&#x27;t cut the mustard in 2016. And, hey, Bootstrap is made by those guys at Twitter† (not 3 20-year-olds in a coffee shop as you so amusingly put it!) so they probably know a thing or two about UI layout and design. I&#x27;d be interested to know what % of websites now use Bootstrap or something inspired by it. Bootstrap was released as open-source in August 2011, it&#x27;ll be 5-years-old tech this year.<p>2) jQuery: This is a huge productivity boost for JS. Of course you can use that hipster tool Vanilla JS (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vanilla-js.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vanilla-js.com&#x2F;</a>) but jQuery is so concise, the syntax and semantics are well thought out, again papers over browser differences. You can chain operations together. The way it does selectors is brilliant. John Resig basically had some sort of divine inspiration. That fact that he was 14(?) at the time of writing it... well... that&#x27;s how one learns to be humble in life. Sure raw JS is going to blow jQuery out of the water perf-wise but going by what OP says, dev time is what we&#x27;re optimizing for here, jQuery will be plenty fast. It&#x27;s used* on what, ~ 70%..90% of websites? I&#x27;m surprised a version of it isn&#x27;t built into browsers yet. jQuery is 2006 tech, it&#x27;s a decade old this year. (Also released as open-source in August, hmm).<p>† and Angular is Google tech, React is Facebook tech, Rails is 37signals tech but all have have huge open-source communities.<p>* <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.builtwith.com&#x2F;javascript" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.builtwith.com&#x2F;javascript</a>