[bowlofpetunias]

Not quite.

Frameworks and libraries are two different points along a continuous line (not even endpoints). Not black and white, just different shades of gray.

I haven't looked at Zend in a long time, but the difference between Zend 1.x and a pile of libraries was marginal, yet Zend was labelled an "enterprise grade" framework.

(Not dissing Zend, this was a deliberate design approach.)

[girvo]

Symfony, Laravel, they all are done the same way. But in practice, people create libraries specific to these frameworks, and that's where the issue lies. Less code reuse, more reinventing the wheel, more security issues as there are fewer canonical implementations and more scattered libs that may be ported to your framework of choice, but probably won't be...

We can fix this, though. The best part is, the skills learnt and code written while doing so are completely transferable and directly usable by the big frameworks too! So, it's a win-win :)

For what it's worth though, yeah I totally agree with you. It's not an either-or situation.