[rambambam]

Words of wisdom, especially your first and last paragraph. Besides upvoting your comment, I wanted to tell you that.

It's easy to get involved in the ratrace of using the whole shebang for your projects, how big or small these projects may be. I've used some frameworks in the past, but I eventually found out they added more distraction, took forever to learn and they crippled my flexibility. Good old HTML, CSS, PHP (I'm very afraid of saying this here out loud), Javascript and XML worked for me. And programming without a framework was more fun, like a completely blank canvas that makes it very clear that you are the one who has to do it.