You're definitely right, actually. I've been working a lot in clojure, node.js, and html5 <canvas> recently on various projects (more posts later), and there's a definitely feeling of reinventing the wheel, and doing it poorly.

That said, there are a ton of different approaches - At the oak.js meetup, I saw a sammy.js app embedded into couchdb. Definitely not my style, but a cool idea anyway.

I'm very eager to get this into several html5 apps that are currently node.js or rails backends and for particular reasons would be well suited for a lisp backend. The goal is to tie in very closely with the html5 landscape, and drop a lot of the legacy stuff that other frameworks care about.