It would be useful to have a handle on the rivets instance that is instantiated to the current view. I bet there is a TON of useful Rivets functionality that we have not yet discovered, like the below that I copy pasted from a issue respone on rivets Github:
If you're not familiar, view.publish() just reads the current value of all two-way bindings and updates your models with values that are set in the DOM. It's kind of like the inverse of view.sync(), which updates the DOM with the values that are set on your models, the difference being that view.sync() updates all bindings, not just two-way ones.