I really enjoy Bret Victor's talks. Here is one where he discusses his driving principle: Creators need an immediate connection to what they create (e.g. immediate feedback)
I've been using hotloading css, react and redux for the past few months and it's an amazing experience. It enables you to iterate quickly and see changes immediately. (Admittedly, as a project grows, there's a small delay between saving and seeing the change. I'm not sure if it's avoidable or not... But it's still much faster than having to do a full-page reload.)
[0] https://gaearon.github.io/react-hot-loader/
The downside with redux is that simpler things can take a bit more code than you might wish. You have to add an action handler / reducer, action creator, etc. However, it's generally very easy to extend previously written code, and it's very easy to reason about the data / logic flow.
Another pitfall with redux is that it doesn't provide any help when you have to react to changes. A few days ago in reddit I wrote a small example explaining what I mean [0].
You might be interested in checking out relay-local-schema [1], it looks promising for experimenting with GraphQL and Relay.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/3u0167/getting_...