I agree with this point for sure. Frameworks are great if you are going to leverage a lot of the libraries/modules. But often in practice you never do. So then

I agree with this point for sure. Frameworks are great if you are going to leverage a lot of the libraries/modules. But often in practice you never do. So then you end up taking on the issues with using a large codebase. Which is that when you find a bug, it's very hard to trace through code to figure out what's going on. You are investing in learning a specific library/framework rather than the low level details that are on average what you'll need more because in practice you don't get to use the same framework all the time if you switch companies or projects as they tend to have entirely different frameworks or even languages on the backend. I like how Marcin Wichiary though in this ajaxian.com article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/web-ninja-interview-marcin-wichary-creator-of-google-pacman-logo-html5-slide-deck-and-more http://ajaxian.com/archives/web-ninja-interview-marcin-wicha... He basically builds all his libraries from scratch for each project which he can do quickly because he knows what he's doing and can of course leverage his other code for reference. Each iteration simplifies what turns out to be bloated and creates a new code base more matched to the problem he's trying to solve.