Awesome, thanks for this detailed answer! I was really starting to get nervous with the option-overload, but I feel comfortable with Express.js and Node.js and some ORM for the back-end, and vanilla JS for the front-end, so that's probably the direction I'll go! I guess I'll still need a build tool though since I'd like some things like autoprefixer etc, and I'll need to figure out a template engine for Node. Anyway thanks again!