This is a great idea. I suppose that, if catering to the crazies (i.e. futureproofing) is a priority, we need to change a whole lot of code to work this way. I'm happy to start here but I expect that, in the end, the "crazies" will need to override a lot of layouts to make jQuery not load. It would be great if there was something simple that people could override to get whatever basic framework to load in all cases. Something like `JHtml::_('default.framework');` gets called anywhere we need a framework and (if not overridden) jQuery gets loaded. But if a template overrides it (or something...?) then their framework of choice (or none at all) will get loaded instead. 

I actually think this is very worthwhile because, in my opinion, jQuery was really just a stopgap solution for the days when there were huge differences between the browsers. Its usefulness is coming to an end, the future probably belongs to more advanced frameworks like Angular.js.