[brasmusen]

He seems to argue that you can build a more robust application from the ground up. In my limited experience it's the hand rolled applications that are and out hand and unstable. A major advantage of a good framework is that it does force you to stick to it's conventions which typically follow best practices.

As for the barrier of entry I found that learning a framework is like learning a new programming language to a certain extent and to really take full advantage of the framework you need to know the underlying language as well. It seems the barrier of entry is actually raised by frameworks.