I want my app to startup into the Backstage view because this is where our Open documents and Recents and Favorites are. It doesn't appear you can simply set IsApplicationMenuOpen to true in Xaml because it leads to some weird rendering. So I opted to change IsApplicationMenuOpen to true after all of my viewmodels and startup code has ran. The problem with this is now my app starts up with the regular ribbon then switches to the backstage, rather than just starting in the backstage.
I'm basically going for the same sort of starting screen as MS Word 2013 where it opens up in the Open menu ready to start work, rather than opening up to a blank program and making the user manually navigate to open to start.