This is essentially the same problem faced by all frameworks. When they are done well and in a loosely coupled fashion, a framework will make the basic stuff tr

This is essentially the same problem faced by all frameworks. When they are done well and in a loosely coupled fashion, a framework will make the basic stuff trivial to do with a few declarative lines of code and everything you might want to do will be possible without much trouble. Even, perhaps especially, the things that the creators didn't even imagine. When a framework is done badly, in a tightly coupled fashion, it may make a bunch of basic stuff easy but it will also make more complex stuff either impossible or possible but requiring horrendous contortions in the code. I think that a bunch of libraries is better than a poorly designed framework but I still don't think they're a substitute for a well designed framework. Unfortunately, many framework developers' attitude to such contortions is not "wow, we screwed up, we'd better accomodate this valid use case" (or even better make it possible to do declaratively) but instead this: "You shouldn't be doing that"