According to my understanding, I am using 3 VM's here and no models at all, right?  You're saying you'd have done a VM and a M, in this app, even though there's no back-end, etc?   But this does highlight where this example ceases to be instructive.

Maybe you would have wrapped the entire file with a class like you did in the branch?  Though, I'm actually not needing to export anymore, and it is namespaced by RequireJS.