I'm writing a framework that I intend to use because I haven't found anything that quite suits me. I was feeling a little guilty about it, but not after reading this. Thanks.
Frameworks written for general use will always be overengineered yet clunky compared to what you could write for your own project, and here's why: if I'm writing a framework and it has a collection of foo, and I know I only ever add(foo), then I don't have to write a delete(foo) and a search(foo) and a count(foo), just the add function. You also don't have to test those other things, or put anything in your model to support them. Frameworks for general consumption, however, do have to have all that stuff because they don't know what subset you'll need. Now imagine that x100 for all the classes in the framework. Even if it doesn't increase the size of your executable, it still increases the cognitive load in terms of having a full understanding of the source. It's the flip side of "not invented here" - i.e. writing your own is not automatically bad, just a trade-off.
