smash

If it's just a snippet, and require.js made up 20% of the filesize, then why not just have a single file, or assume a single closure and concatenate a few files together? You'll gain even better filesize from minifying inside a single closure. The formalised step up from this is SMASH, which is how d3 is built: https://github.com/mbostock/smash

One big advantage of vanilla Make is the community. There are some very nice tools that work well with make (such as https://github.com/mbostock/smash).

Basically it boils down to what you want to do. If you know you’re replacing many parts of your page with data you have to load, use a framework like angular, backbone, ember, … If you visualize data, use d3. If you need to animate some UI elements but don’t need much else, use jQuery. Else use plain JS, maybe with some shortcuts like function $(sel) { return document.querySelector(sel) }. maybe with underscore.js if your love funtional programming. In any case, strive to write idiomatic code. d3, jQuery, and many else e.g. have their own variant of $, select, querySelector, … – decide on one framework and use its way to write code. Any you’ll want to find a way to compartimentalize code. https://github.com/mbostock/smash is good, and http://browserify.org/