routing is partially broken after removing app-drawer-layout...

[rchrdnsh]

I am trying to use the polymer-2-starter kit, but design my own layout, while retaining the app routing awesomeness...only it's kinda broke now. All I have left on my app component now is app-location, app-route, iron-selector and iron-pages. Routing is still working, but the URL is reloading everything every time, rather than loading only the part that has changed. Not sure why this changed, as I assumed the app-drawer-layout, app-drawer, app-toolbar and other app-layout components would not affect the routing mechanism. I'm sure it's nothing too big, just don't know what's going wrong :-(