I'm ok with a SPA as long as long you also have an API. I'm also ok with a SPA as long as your app is just a content consumption app, e.g. you don't publish original content that is not accessible through other sources. But since even aggregating or re-mixing content or comments can actually be seen as creating "new content", the distinction is blurry.

My point is that we should be able to consume data on the web without having the full-browser+javascript to be the lowest level interface we have to this data.

And about the clients' interests: well, I think it is our duty as professionals to be able to see past our clients' interest too, to try and shape the future of the field we work in to the right shape, at least after we provide the clients with with good enough solutions (and yes, we should remember to stop at "good enough", because there's no point polishing a short-sighted solution, instead of working more to reshape it into a more future oriented one) and ensure short term profitability. Now, we don't all have a common notion of this "right shape" of the future of the web, but I do my best to shape it as much as I can towards "my kind of people's right shape" and push our vision up as many people's throats as we can, hopefully helping us all escape from this hell of short-sighted short-term clients' interests based decisions that brought us the current overcomplicated mess that the web is right now.