On top of that I remember the first nodeup podcasts and on twitter some key member from the community would bitch about express all the time. Ranging from express is bloated to middleware is a shitty abstraction to you don't need a framework in Node.js. It was really weird because express was (is?) one of the most used framework in the Node.js community and here you have people that other people follow and listen to tell you that it's crap.