I've been doing a lot of talking recently with colleagues who do front end development. The topic of conversation has often been why the profession is regarded, explicitly or not, as secondary to back end development. It is my view that many developers who do back end view front end as easier, even if too fiddly for their liking. Therefore, back end developers like to take it upon themselves to write markup and CSS evaluating it the same way as they would their server-side code. If it works, it works. Which, as I think any CSS developer worth their salt knows, is completely not the case on the front end.

Development frameworks, in the loosest sense of the term, do a good job of preventing developers from having to reinvent the wheel each time they begin a new project. Each project naturally calls for a different starting point dependent upon what the end result should be. Drupal, I think, begins at a pretty high level of done-ness.

I should think that it is a given that frameworks currently in use by any sizable community offer this basic benefit to the degree which it is designed to. I think, then, that frameworks need to be judged on what I see to be an almost equally important factor: its ability to prevent developers from boxing themselves in, or over-engineering their application.