Do whatever makes you happy.
I personally abhor large frameworks as unnecessary, slow, and poor code quality. Writing code like that does not make me happy. I find this kind of code frequently becomes a low performance baseline by which people rate themselves and others.
I was interviewing a few months ago because I thought more money would make me happier. When I realized I was failing to perform in job interviews by people with almost no experience I was not happy.
At first I blamed myself as old and irrelevant. But it dawned on me that such job interviews lacked a certain level of maturity. They didn’t know how to assess candidates because they weren’t looking for engineers to solve problems. They were looking for tool users to use trendy tools on solved problems. Once that became clear to me I stopped all further interviews and gained a new appreciation for they I already have. My fear is that I would be trading a known quality for something far more immature, higher risk, and crappier benefits in the hopes of a salary increase.
