I agree. but there are some days where you just want to create a simple site and you want it to follow a set pattern.
if you are inexperienced then its tough to come up with a good pattern of your own.
i typically borrow from html5boilerplate.
but it would be nice if esri just threw together a simple site to get folks up and running.
the samples are great - but they all do one thing only
K M, I think I could live with what you are proposing. It just seems insane to me that in order to do GIS you have to also at least have a grasp on the various programming languages. I know just enough to get by on several languages but I don't know enough to do anything very interesting. My very small amount of experience working with javascript has been quite painful and the various samples don't just simply combine. For instance, when I first started, I found an example of using a basemap and then when I tried to overlay my operational (dynamic) layers nothing happened. After more research I figured out what I had done incorrectly. I have seen the example of a web app that looks like Flex but is actually Javascript and this is basically what I'd like to do.