To truly understand and appreciate a language, I believe one must write these features first without a framework (that at least let's someone appreciate the point of a framework more).

However, in this case, this is our own implementation. And unfortunately, this is due to a large number of corner cases we need to handle (such as Sybase support, own SQL driver support, because of multiple result sets, etc.), I don't believe a framework could replace our implementation.

Trust me, though, if we were to rewrite this all from scratch, a completely new approach would be taken.

But generally speaking, if a company is still using Delphi, it's probably because they don't have the liquidity to actually re-write their code base.