Last time I worked with Backbone I recall there being a schism in the community regarding the use of JQuery under the hood. The author was presented with performance metrics comparing Backbone to a vanilla JS fork which had made substantial improvements to rendering performance. That might've represented a major turning point in the evolution of the framework, but perhaps one of the reasons it stagnated was little to none of that criticism was taken onboard?
I'm not sure what you mean by that last part. We removed the jQuery dependency in View [0] and History [1], and I wrote a small shiim to allow Backbone Views to work with vanilla JS [2]. No schism, just not a huge paradigm shift either (which is a good thing).
