I will second the write your own micro-framework statement. When I first began toying with frameworks, I felt much you, chromium. I understood the concept and

I will second the write your own micro-framework statement. When I first began toying with frameworks, I felt much you, chromium. I understood the concept and the idea behind everything, but some of it felt like "magic." So, I sat down and wrote a basic clone of rails in PHP. It lacked a lot of features but it had basic routing, models, views, controllers. I even wrote some code to generate migrations and applying/rolling back those migrations. I never even finished that little faux framework because once I got into it and started mucking around, everything kind of clicked into place for me as far as demystifying the "magic" of everything.