I did some consulting a few months ago. A FOAF had developed and launched a quite comprehensive online textbook, and their success was choking the the website. They don't know much programming, and had they not used a framework (and one of the slower ones at that), they wouldn't have launched. Period.
I moved in, got them off shared hosting, replaced the built-in search with a Apache Solr, tuned the cache and a few other quick wins, took my money and left them my phonenumber. They live to fight another year or two, and I'll stop by and help again then.
Scalability is not your problem, getting people to give a shit is.
The majority of Drupal users I know couldn't write a line of C++ to save their lives. Many of them can't write a line of PHP, either. I'm constantly impressed with the patience of these people, but they get results.
In a world where every church, school, and small business could afford its own personal Rasmus Lerdorf, we'd all have much more efficient code that was lovingly hand-optimized for our specific applications. In the real world, hardware grows on trees, while Rasmus Lerdorf probably costs something like $400 per hour.
I moved in, got them off shared hosting, replaced the built-in search with a Apache Solr, tuned the cache and a few other quick wins, took my money and left them my phonenumber. They live to fight another year or two, and I'll stop by and help again then.
Scalability is not your problem, getting people to give a shit is.
http://teddziuba.com/2008/04/im-going-to-scale-my-foot-up-y....
Frameworks helps getting people to give a shit, custom C++ extensions doesn't, so use a framework, unless Yahoo! called.