Interesting, I hadn't looked at things that way. I think though that the control over the code base wasn't much of the issue: the mental bloat it was bringing

Interesting, I hadn't looked at things that way. I think though that the control over the code base wasn't much of the issue: the mental bloat it was bringing in our thought process though definitely was. We many times solved problems following the underlying CMS' patterns, and that ended up eating more and more of our resources. IMHO, our main gain here is the fact that we can focus back on the end user and the story we're trying to tell through our apps.