Out of interest, what language is your framework for? I'm seriously thinking of stopping using PHP because of the weight of the frameworks -- at least on Python there are microframeworks in which I am not left with a massive bottlenecks on the simplest Hello World page. Sure, you can scale but it's becoming ridiculous that I am forced to be so frugal with processor intensive tasks in the rest of the web application just because of the framework.
My own framework and ORM writing days are long past and the software I write nowadays has very different constraints (data/text mining).
I totally share your sentiment about having to be frugal because of wasteful frameworks. My approach is to prefer libraries over frameworks. I start out using the most bare-bones configuration possible (no frameworks, no ORM, no CMS, etc) and then I selectively add well maintained libraries created by people whose attitude I understand.
I think code reuse is generally overrated, particularly when it comes to the rather trivial things that web frameworks do.
This is probably not very helpful to you. I apologize.
