I agree with this. The way I see it is that the more you aim for consolidation at the expense of competition, the less freedom you have to renew your approach i

I agree with this. The way I see it is that the more you aim for consolidation at the expense of competition, the less freedom you have to renew your approach if you can't quite get the results you want. This leads to people reinventing the wheel in such a way they're happy with the results and also learn new techniques that can be applicable outside of the framework dev environment. This is great for innovation, and when you can code independently of a framework and create your own solutions, you're just one step closer to pushing the boundaries and coming up with something special. A custom microframework is great for that as you can get to grips with the concept of ORM, MVC, OOP (with PHP in particular) and all manner of other techniques. On a personal level, I had the choice of learning a framework to make a REST API, or figuring it out for myself by making my own solution. I re-invented the wheel - probably made something wonky - but it's invaluable knowledge. Had I taken heed of the OP I may still be wrestling with Symfony2 or CakePHP right now. Looking at it another way, this article could have been written a few years ago and instead of Javascript, it could have talked about fresh web developers creating a blog as their first project. The analogous question posed would be, "why don't people just install Wordpress?" The answer to that would be: "because they won't learn anything."