yes the man that cosponsored the bill that gave Rosa Parks the Congressional Gold Medal is racist . <| sep |> I suppose I ' m at least somewhat familiar with a lot of things at this point . RethinkDB was one I haven ' t heard of , and does appear to be exactly what I want for a database . I was unaware of React being able to use different templating engines , in which case I suppose most of my React complaints are then complaints about JSX ? There ' s absolutely nothing stopping you from using plain jane ES 6 javascript as your templating language , if that ' s what you desire . I suppose writing a quickandeasy template engine that just compiles down to ES 6 wouldn ' t be difficult . like I mentioned above , all I really want is to write raw markup in JS files and interpolate into it JS expressions evaluated in the current scope . The primary thing that I don ' t understand or quite know how to approach is how to enable that markup to be comprehended within a JS file instead of just throwing a ton of errors . A Babel plugin I guess ? Where might I start learning to do that ? Those things being mostly resolved , I ' m also not really sure how to make something akin to Meteor ' s Tracker a global observer that keeps track of which functions have been called with which variables reactive data sources as parameters , and recalls a function when its parameters change . Is there a minimal library out there that does this , or if not how might I go about making one ? EDIT I should also note that I ' m a bit hesitant to use RethinkDB considering it was officially shut down last month and I don ' t want to be using a zombie project . ANOTHER EDIT This article frameworks pretty accurately describes how I feel about frameworks at the moment . Abstraction in unidirectional Any framework can only an approximation of what I would naturally come up with if left to think of it all alone . Any library or framework I choose to use will limit what my code can become to the domain of possible use cases compatible with that library or framework , or in other words , my code has to somehow fit into the tree of abstraction that library or framework establishes and do this simultaneously with other frameworks and libraries I use as well . That ' s why I ' m trying to find solutions that combine DRY with flexibility so that I can still code the way I want without tearing my hair out trying to reinvent the wheel .