It allowed us to just jump into Clojure development from one day to the other while understanding what is the build system doing. I can't tell the same about the prepackaged grunt and gulp files which come with certain key-turn projects.
For example, here is a simple gulpfile for a livereload environment that compiles sass and coffeescript [3]. It's over 500 lines long, and it requires extensive knowledge of at least 20 plugins. And half of those plugins are there to address the shortcomings of other plugins, or of gulp itself [4].
But really the worst part is that every time some dependency of a dependency pushes a point release, it breaks the entire build. My team has resorted to passing around a stable `node_modules` dropbox folder. I'm literally terrified to run npm update!
Anyway boot looks cool, I can't wait to try it out :)
[1] https://github.com/lynndylanhurley/gulp-rev-replace-stream
[2] https://github.com/lynndylanhurley/generator-gulp-of-drano
[3] https://github.com/lynndylanhurley/generator-gulp-of-drano/b...
Have you taken a look at broccoli[1]? We ran across it after going the Fileset route, but were refreshed to see that it also does a kind of Fileset thing (they call them "trees")[2]. I don't know much more about it other than that it's what's underneath ember-cli, and the Ember people do a lot of good work in tools realm. Anyway, it could be a way for you to realize some of the niceties of the boot approach over in JS-land.
1. https://github.com/broccolijs/broccoli
2. http://www.solitr.com/blog/2014/02/broccoli-first-release/