(To declare, I have written large apps with Backbone, so I'm not entirely talking from my ass.)
You've gone from a simple, succinct, and easily understood set of code to something that now relies on 2 extra frameworks (backbone and underscore), in addition to still needing jQuery. You've had to incorporate several layers of abstraction (views, cloning events) to simply do what was originally done in a few lines.
I know what the appeal of something like Backbone is. You think that adding in all this abstraction will make it easier to maintain your product. I will even agree that to an extent, it does.
However, a big problem is that the people that already care about organizing their code well, already do so. Backbone is so needlessly open-ended and directionless that a dev who doesn't already know how to write good code will just write worse code.
When I first learned Python, it was enlightening. Here was a language that says, "This is the right way to do it". It got rid of the baggage of other languages and got to business. Backbone is definitely not that for JavaScript development.
Backbone gives you so much rope to hang yourself with, and with so little sense of how things should properly fit together, that it's like wandering around a desert for days on end with a noose on your neck, until you fall into a deep enough hole and die.
I prefer to write my code so that there is an overall architecture, usually with a modular pattern when possible. Anything that needs to happen code-wise for a particular module is all contained within that code block and nothing else. That code is more or less like what was originally posted, where all the things that matter for that module are done in that module.
The other technique I use for modules to talk to each other is sheerly through event signatures. If you have a login module, it can emit events like "loggedin" or "loggedout". Any other module can subscribe to those events and do their own thing, without interfering with others, etc.
This pattern works very well and is a hell of a lot more usable than anything I've ever been able to do with Backbone.
Finally, Coffeescript is not JavaScript. It's another annoying abstraction.
JQuery is not JavaScript, but an incredibly useful library.
Stop piling one layer on top of another thinking you're making your life easier. Get back to basics, learn how to structure your code, and just get some fucking work done.