Personally, I find it easier and faster and more flexible doing it vanilla style. However, you still have to come up with your own abstractions (those you actually need), meaning, you have to own the stack. This may be a good thing, but is it is also challenging regarding human resources.

As I see it, frameworks are really about making code accessible, while owning as little as possible of it, by this favouring sharing and the interchangeability of work force. Also, they establish a code policy and the kind of general approach, which is again favourable with regard to human resources. (Now you can have multiple phases of development, where neither team knows anything of the other, which would be hardly possible, if you had to own and maintain the stack. In the old paradigm of art versus engineering, it's a massive shift towards the latter. Which certainly is in line with the general trend.)