Agreed. Back when I was working on rails type projects we always wished we could just drop down into sinatra-ish APIs for certain things that didn't align with the "rails way".

Thats a +1 for LoopBack - its built on and extends express. You can drop from the magic into a barebones express route if you want:

http://apidocs.strongloop.com/loopback/#var-app-loopback