First off, to call this “shameless self-promotion” is disingenuous. Besides, when someone has put this much effort to something - in their free time, no less - they’re quite entitled to shout about it!
As for the framework itself. I’ll be honest, my first thought was predictable - “another front-end framework?!?”. But then I looked at it in more detail, and I like a lot of what I see.
I’d like to make some comments and observations in list-form, if I may?
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I’m not all that keen on some of it visually, but that’s a moot point - since it’s so customisable. I love that the styles are primarily structural, which should make it much easier to style and make unique.
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Having said that, the demo site might benefit from having alternative “themes” to look at; partly because really good-looking examples will “grab” people, partly because it demonstrates the flexibility.
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My biggest bug-bear about a lot of JQuery plugins and the like is that they force very specific markup structure on you. Things like carousels in particular. If Toolkit provides more flexibility, that’s a great plus-point in my book.
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The JS being class/component based is great.
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In fact, modern approaches all round. I particularly like the fact that it uses CSS3 animations where possible.
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From a personal point-of-view, being RequireJS-friendly is a big plus point. No shims for Backbone work, which is great!
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Again personal preference, but being SASS-based rather than Less is alright by me!
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Personal preference once again, but I’d have preferred Grunt to Gulp - but you can’t please everyone!
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Lastly, if there’s one thing I think might really help the accompanying website, it’s trying to cram as many of the components and styles onto a single page as possible, to make it easier to see what it offers at a glance; having a drop-down and forward/back arrows to browse through the framework is good for viewing components in isolation, but a “single page demo” would, I think, make it more accessible.
Overall though, really good work!