So what we have so far from these 3 libraries is basically a decomposed backbone with declarative bindings. That will cover 99% of your typical app. I don't find there is too much boilerplate.
Take a look at the Ember examples at http://emberjs.com/. They're doing a lot more with a lot less code. Backbone had its day, but the world is moving on, and a new project that only offers Backbone-equivalent functionality won't garner much interest from me or probably anyone.
* https://github.com/component/view for views built on top of reactive for declarative bindings
* https://github.com/component/model for models
* https://github.com/component/router for routing
So what we have so far from these 3 libraries is basically a decomposed backbone with declarative bindings. That will cover 99% of your typical app. I don't find there is too much boilerplate.