You're overestimating the complexity of (b). Composing libraries is pretty trivial, and in my experience easier than learning to do meaningful work in a framewo

You're overestimating the complexity of (b). Composing libraries is pretty trivial, and in my experience easier than learning to do meaningful work in a framework, and certainly easier than working around framework limitations. The problems with (b) isn't the composition, which is easy, but the availability of quality libraries. Popular libraries are often written (and re-written, and re-written, and re-written) as plug-ins for specific frameworks. For example, it used to be hard to find a JavaScript drag-and-drop library that worked independently of JQuery. That said, I'll take that pain over the pain of a framework. When you get to the interesting bits of an application, it's so much easier to evolve my own design than to work around framework design decisions.