My own framework and ORM writing days are long past and the software I write nowadays has very different constraints (data/text mining).

I totally share your sentiment about having to be frugal because of wasteful frameworks. My approach is to prefer libraries over frameworks. I start out using the most bare-bones configuration possible (no frameworks, no ORM, no CMS, etc) and then I selectively add well maintained libraries created by people whose attitude I understand.

I think code reuse is generally overrated, particularly when it comes to the rather trivial things that web frameworks do.

This is probably not very helpful to you. I apologize.