Yes pleaseeeee tell me I can take advantage of just the View layer and use my own Model and Controller setup. With Titanium views are 'just' JS objects, so I can use Spine, Backbone, and other libraries for business and data logic.

Um, you can do that in React just fine.

It's just you don't really need Backbone with React because plain object/array models are more convenient, and controllers aren't needed because there's no need to “orchestrate changes” between view and model. Check out Flux as an example of architecture (not a framework) that works really well with React.

Exactly. I once started a project with backbone and used React for the view layer. I quickly realized I didn't need the Backbone models and collections, and ended up only using the router and a few small other things. Eventually i replaced these remaining parts with some 'micro-frameworks' like lo-dash, page.js, superagent, etc.