I think it depends on what you do. I spent first half of my career ordering a la carte.. In hindsight, I ended up building a lot of crap that the framework shou

I think it depends on what you do. I spent first half of my career ordering a la carte.. In hindsight, I ended up building a lot of crap that the framework should have provided for me. This is the major reason why I have learned to be cautious with getting wowed by the apparent simplicity of micro frameworks. At the very minimum, I want a framework to have an opinionated model layer with migration support, and chances are you will get trickle down benefits from frameworks that have opinionated M layer.. Look at djangos form abstraction for instance. Or the way validation is handled in Django models, which in turn opens up for the possibility of creating a neat REST abstraction. These are the types of abstractions that you end up writing yourself or not writing at all when you go the 'light framework' route, but they are almost always handy and will save you time.