Yeah, I felt the same too:) My strategy here is to have a deep knowledge and master plain Javascript before learning any of these libraries. Javascript is different than some other languages like C#, Java...at first I hated Javascript because I always felt like struggling, but now I love it. Once you master it and learn how things work under the hood (prototypal inheritance, first class functions, closures...) you probably can use plain Javascript for the most of your your code or even create your own JS libraries. Just my two cents:)