Honestly my situation is similar to yours. Using PHP for web applications mostly more than 8 years. I had many frustration with PHP over the years, but it has a quite strong community & mature documentation, millions of code samples. a dozen of giant MVC frameworks that some of them are famous as PHP itself. what my problem in getting started with Nodejs was lack of understanding JS's basics not even Nodejs itself (yea i was really blind & fool but i was thinking that i knew JS) i was reading source codes of famous libraries in Nodejs. Quickly I have seen my problem. i didn't knew JS even though i was using it more than 8 years. i was unable to understand even the basic libraries or frameworks. That moment was an illumination for me. then i started to learn JS in real. i've read the famous JS books during 6 months. with the decision of never try to code before fully understand. that was my leap for being a better developer (it worked even for my PHP knowledge) by the way i still read the books :)

After that 2 years i have developed more than 5 projects with nodejs. i still don't have a stable MVC structure for expressjs (not like SF2 or ZF2 etc.) keep changing it every project, improving. but it's a nice journey to learn something new when you are 36 years old. now i have quite stable vision/exprience right before starting a project while planning. Already started to use task runners grunt/gulp, actually i have developed a deployment app with nodejs & connected it with my own git server. i work way professional & efficient than before. My humble advice is read the source codes of Express.js Sails.js maybe even Backbone.js then see if there is any black spot in your understanding. (if not that's nice of you :) ) Node.js is upto something very nice for all web developers.