broccoli

Wow, that all sounds like an absolute nightmare! 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/

Hey Colin, Not negative at all! Ember CLI is a relatively small layer on top of a bunch of other open source modules. The core of the build system uses Broccoli[1], which is like a more powerful Gulp. Dependencies are managed with bower and npm, and we use off-the-shelf npm modules to do the post-processing. Basically, you should think of it as a curation of what we think are the best-of-breed tools for Ember developers, with a layer of developer ergonomics applied on top. At the same time, we don't do anything to hide the implementation from you. (Each new Ember app generated by Ember CLI includes the Brocfile.js right in the root directory.) [1]: https://github.com/broccolijs/broccoli

The ember community has really embraced ES6 modules and now with the introduction of broccoli[1] and the broccoli-es6-transpiler[2] it's really easy to start using modules and the other ES6 features right now. If you're already using SASS or Less then an ES6 transpiler seems like a natural next step. [1] https://github.com/broccolijs/broccoli [2] https://github.com/sindresorhus/broccoli-es6-transpiler