To me, the biggest value that alexa-app provides is it has a small and reasonable encapsulation of parsing alexa requests, and formulating alexa compatible json responses.

I'm wondering if it makes sense to break these out into 2 small, very specific modules:

alexa-request - parses an http request body from alexa and populates a simple javascript object
alexa-response - builds an http response object that can be returned to/consumed by amazon alexa

Ideally both of these modules would be absolute minimal, and just follow the alexa documentation for creating/consuming alexa requests/responses.

I haven't looked around at other alexa modules for skill presentation, but I've run into several people that don't even want to use express, let alone alexa-app for building skills, and I suspect breaking these out means people could use the same robust core alexa formatting modules across the whole ecosystem.