Why start from scratch? Seems like reinventing the wheel to start from a blank slate rather than forking npm etc. I guess forking doesn't get you to the top of HN though.
"If you think about it, if we tried to build all of the above on top of npm, it would be npm in name only. Even if Meteor packages were in npm, you wouldn't use the npm tool to find or install packages (you'd use a wrapper that implemented the 'release snapshots', 'curation', 'repeatability' considerations), nor could you drop them directly into existing npm applications (per 'client vs server' and 'asset bundling')."