The problem is there is no guarantee they will play nicely together, not clash, or provide similar and compatible APIs. JavaScript developers are running into a very similar set of problems and having everyone cobble together their own solutions is pretty clearly not an answer, which obvious to those who have tried. You may already know what is being abstracted by some of the more expansive frameworks (Cappuccino, SproutCore, Backbone, etc) but there are a lot of people who do not know or do not want to deal with the differences in browsers, etc.
I'm assuming that you don't consider jQuery or its ilk restrictive as far as abstracting the DOM. I don't know of many application developers who would prefer to deal with the low-level DOM API (which differs across browsers, etc) instead of a library like jQuery. There are many people who approach application structure from a similar viewpoint. Instead of rolling their own and running into problems scaling and maintaining their applications, they can use a framework that provides an abstraction that is proven to work. Everyone tries to roll their own pet framework project because that's where the glory is. That's not necessarily the best thing for the future of the web.
> Everyone tries to roll their own pet framework project because that's where the glory is.
Here's jtaby about twenty minutes earlier:
> Everyone today wants to get the personal glory out of their own little pet project instead of getting the glory out of contributing important patches to existing projects.
The diminutive "little pet" prefix at one point applied to: linux kernel, kde, gnome, jquery, prototype.js, node.js, ruby, &etc. Your dismissal of small, young projects is akin to saying "Don't start a startup, just join a big business!"
You're calling out to people in the Bazaar and asking them to join your Cathedral. Good luck!
I agree that rolling new frameworks/libraries out for the glory only is a terrible thing but they generally don't do much harm since the truly atrocious projects fade into oblivion. We can only hope at least one thing was learned from them.
I do not consider jQuery restrictive and in fact it's liberating because it provides a core set of tools that are much more useful than the core tools provided by native JS. jQuery was born out of a need. As long as something is more useful than what it wraps I tend to not mind it. But wrapping things arbitrarily like HTML is just useless.
I do see a stark difference between marrying independent frameworks that are proven and writing a brand new one that encompasses all the ideas of each.
I'm assuming that you don't consider jQuery or its ilk restrictive as far as abstracting the DOM. I don't know of many application developers who would prefer to deal with the low-level DOM API (which differs across browsers, etc) instead of a library like jQuery. There are many people who approach application structure from a similar viewpoint. Instead of rolling their own and running into problems scaling and maintaining their applications, they can use a framework that provides an abstraction that is proven to work. Everyone tries to roll their own pet framework project because that's where the glory is. That's not necessarily the best thing for the future of the web.