[orange8]

> Currently I'm stuck with a codebase with almost no documentation of a mess of legacy and new code with layers and layers of developers' opinions on top.

If it was originally built using a framework, what framework do you think that would be? And would it still be in active development and evolving today? How do you integrate new code in a legacy or evolving framework? My experience of this says it is not really a framework vs no-framework problem, but a problem of how to keep an applications code base healthy in a world of ever changing and evolving features, developers, frameworks and technologies. I think thats the real problem you are dealing with here, and not "hot-shot developer from 10 years back didn't use the coolest stack of that time".

And it is the problem you were hired to solve. If everything was working perfectly with no new features required to be added to the legacy code base, they simply wouldn't need you.