Obviously you should do whatever works for your team, and I'm not commenting on the quality or necessity of your framework. In my opinion, it's just much easier to edit well formatted markup, verbose as it may be, than wading through a forest of $el and appendTo and such. Not to mention, hiring a talented visual designer that knows html & css is much easier than finding one that knows their way around a client-side MVC framework. Unicorns and all that. To each his own.