Core team member here. That's excellent feedback and we are definitely going to be pushing in that direction where we can. API simplicity will always be a primary goal and a modular core implementation will help advancement of mobile support and testability. The event system is already self contained and shouldn't depend on anything in React at all.
Re:The Road to React 1.0
by AdrianRossouw on Friday March 28, 2014 @07:21PM
(#7490594)
I had the same feeling as you. I became ok with it after I realized it could be removed in the future.
http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/why-wrong-to-be-afraid-angular
I am looking forward to trying react though, because of how well it plays with backbone (which is still my preference)
The more I look into react the more I wonder if some intermediary representation of the DOM ought to be standardized so that a native "diff/batch" algorithm can be provided as regular functions. I think react would help this cause if it can break up into several projects (react-events, react-virtual-dom, react-dom-diff/batch, etc). Perhaps other projects can adopt parts of react into their own frameworks. Just a thought.