On 1) I choose Knockout.js a few years ago and I still use it for everything (they have proven backwards compatibility, they've been around a while, the core devs are friendly, it's "modern" (3.3 added components and such) and it plays well with others (jQuery particulary, you can wrap jquery plugins in 15-20 lines of code and lo-dash), it's also 'just' MVVM so it doesn't impose any structure you don't really need, checkout https://vimeo.com/97519516 for what people do with it.
2) Agree on every point, 80% of the stuff I do day to day could have been done with Delphi 5 by dragging two components onto a canvas and connecting a data source and then going for coffee, We have the ability to render 3D scenes in the browser but paginating through a datagrid is still none-standard.
2) Agree on every point, 80% of the stuff I do day to day could have been done with Delphi 5 by dragging two components onto a canvas and connecting a data source and then going for coffee, We have the ability to render 3D scenes in the browser but paginating through a datagrid is still none-standard.