IMO it's not so much that frameworks need to solve these things, it's that you should be wrapping this sort of functionality in a more declarative way regardless, some devs either don't think about this at all or let it get out of control. I fully agree with Jeremy that you should not be using jQuery directly, I can't think of any case where it could not, or should not be abstracted out, jQuery is just the DOM helper. I like bits of backbone but I wish they were decoupled so you could just take the bits you wanted