In general I just use npm... I don't use bower or jspm... for that matter, I don't think browserify where needed is so bad.. there's also options with babeljs, which I'm liking more and more.
A base set of packages, for your external functionality, your core (shared functionality) and the rest makes a lot of sense, and isn't that hard to do. In the end it's pretty easy to reason about, and with sourcemaps and better build tools it's easy to use. Though having to have a watcher or build process when JS changes takes some getting used to... if you're used to compiling server code, it really isn't bad...
A base set of packages, for your external functionality, your core (shared functionality) and the rest makes a lot of sense, and isn't that hard to do. In the end it's pretty easy to reason about, and with sourcemaps and better build tools it's easy to use. Though having to have a watcher or build process when JS changes takes some getting used to... if you're used to compiling server code, it really isn't bad...