That's confusing... it's Backbone's event model basically just an Event Emitter? Is there some special functionality that warrants bringing in all of Backbone vs. just using one of the millions Event Emitter libraries that are out there. You can even get just Backbone's models if that's what you want.
Source: I've ported most of the whole thing to pure angular.js. The code is riddled with UI elements directly being injected based on events, where it could have been a service API.