From my experience, the more independent projects you include, the harder an application will be to maintain, let alone configure and build. Am I just old and cranky? Or is there reasonable justification to do this?
Once you've built a couple applications from scratch without using a framework, you begin to realize just how boring and error-prone things can get when you do them by hand. I want to get to the good stuff, the meat of my application, as quickly as possible. Knowing a framework inside-out lets me do just that.
Maybe the next time you're forced into using a framework, start looking at how it's put together under the hood. It's educational and a lot of fun. And you realize just how much accumulated knowledge these frameworks contain :)
If you are starting a project, like others said, it is probably small so start with the minimal you need to get something working. And start with what you are most familiar with. Developers like to evaluate things and analyze to the Nth degree because it can be fun to bike shed. In reality the technology for the most part doesn't matter, especially for web stuff.
No, but you may be a bit too optimistic. By the time you hand craft your CSS and Javascript to support all the browsers and features you need, you will have created yet another framework: deedubaya.js
> Or is there reasonable justification to do this?
The browser was meant to display documents. We keep trying to make into an runtime environment.