I think you should write a micro-framework. I feel the same way about ORM. It's completely irrational on my part because I'm extremely comfortable writing absurd numbers of joins using crazy criteria for my day-to-day at work, and have some cognitive dissonance because here I am, about to let a library do all the heavy lifting for me.

The end result is in order for me to accept ORMs I had to know the pattern. To know the pattern, I had to write a simple ORM layer on my own. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't as good as SQLAlchemy, by far, but it gave me enough insight to appreciate them, and to know when to use them. By all means, keep using CGI, but leave it to the small projects.

And yes, you're too used to PHP. Branch out, it's more fun.