Backbone Marionette would make the LOC comparison a fair one and is worth looking into if you haven't already. Marionette is an especially good answer for people who like the Backbone way of organizing apps but hate boilerplate/non-declarative view bindings.

My favorite part of Marionette is that it has opinions about things like model/view management -- so it avoids a lot of boilerplate -- but it can almost always be molded/tweaked to fit your specific needs (animations, lazy loading, views partially rendered on the server). It lets you 1) mix and match pieces build to work with Backbone (ModelBinder for declarative model-view bindings, Relational for client-side relations, etc.), 2) scale state change management up and down as appropriate for your app (via model changes, controller interactions, route events), and does not force you into a fully single-page architecture if you don't want it.

Anyway, I think Marionette is a pretty great way to write small, modular, readable code without sacrificing high-level abstractions.