Comment Re:No really, it's jQuery that's broken (Score 1) 213
You make some good point. Howevr, imagine the following not uncommon scenario:
1. A small number of experienced developers starts a project
2. The devs choose to build their own framework for the reasons you describe
3. PM wants ever more features, the project grows, more developers join
4. All new code is build on the framework made in step 2
5. Framework is extended
6. Original devs leave
So now everyone can use the framework, but it's original devs stopped maintaining it. Everyone know how to use the framework, but nobody knows its inner workings well enough - we have a custom, still lightweight framework tailored for the job, but nobody's maintaining it. The worst of both worlds, a framework maintained by people you can't rely on to understand it and fix its bugs, and the initial investment to build it in the first place.
In the end, you're right, there is no clearly defined criteria for which approach is better than the other, both ways has a very good chance to bite you in the ass. My perspective however, not as a developers of production systems but a software testing engineer (writing code to break other people's code