One other question: are there Backbone examples small enough to digest but large enough to be more authentic than a to-do list? This is where I struggle to come up with good teaching examples -- a whole real-world app is simply too much to take in when one is trying to transition to a JS app mindset (and of course the code is usually minified/obfuscated), but examples like to-do lists are so simple that they don't show how a tool addresses actual real-world problems.

Thank you for these :) I admit the last time I went hunting was a while ago, it's good to see so many more. For various reasons, the templated widget part of Dojo made it the right choice for my current project, but I strongly suspect a Backbone project will be in my future, either for fun or profit.