I am the author of AFrameJS and am actually a bit surprised that somebody submitted my library here, as I am still proving it out with a mobile app that I am developing and trying get useful documentation written. Both Backbone and AFrame are very similar in their goals, to enable authors to write MVC applications. I was already writing AFrame based on the common features found in other apps that I have written for clients when Backbone was released. The release of another library made me quite happy to see that other developers were tackling the same issues, and I was really surprised at how similar our approaches were. Thus far most of the code I have seen written in Javascript has been very spaghetti-like, where there is no to very little separation of defining models, having potentially multiple displays for each piece of data, and where retrieving data is written directly in display code. MVC seems to be an idea that hasn't caught on in the JS world even though the concepts have been thoroughly vetted in other languages for years. I was happy to see Backbone come out, as it meant my ideas were not uniquely my own, that MVC in JS was a worthy cause.
Looking at Backbone, I think that overall it is very well architected, lightweight, and provides a lot of functionality. One thing that it provides that I do not is routing. I really like a lot of their approaches and am actually incorporating some of their ideas back into my own code.
As to saying you'd need something more than just buzzwords to convert over, I am not advocating anybody convert over yet. What I am asking for now since this has made it to Hacker News is for feedback on the overall architecture and what would make the library more helpful to a larger audience.
Thanks,
Shane