What happened with Backbone? Did I read you will try to avoid bias? I completely understand that you'd want to benchmark against the trendiest frameworks: after all this is Javascript and what matters is what happened in the last 12 months. Yet, as a Backbone user, and after playing around with the other popular frameworks, I still do not see a compelling reason to move dozens of well running projects to a new framework. Here's my bias:

Shaving milliseconds in rendering, repaints, scripting, etc? For what? Modern devices make it almost irrelevant. If you'd be selling seconds to milliseconds I'd say ok let's have a look.

Complex dependencies vs zero dependencies. So now I need some library to bind/transpile/build many other libraries that in the end will...shave some milliseconds. You just added unnecessary complexity to solve the same problem, not to mention more KB to download.

JSX??? Don't get me started here.

Backbone core library is all I need. It packs routing, binding, event handling, rendering. Yours is useless out of the box, to be used on a real complex app it needs...more dependencies.

Fork Backbone, add a virtual dom to shave them milliseconds, and I'd argue that we've made progress.