Besides, the website look and feel and even the way it responds is only a fraction of the point. Maintenance, expandability, developer accessibility, technical debt, complexity, dependencies, workflow. All come into play when it comes time to meet the brief, which might come from someone with big visual curvy, crunchy ideas and lots of money.
I'm not trying to sell you something, duckmysick. I'm rationalising my technical method which doesn't involve grids - even if the designer has used one. I understand I can't qualify anything here, I'm cool with that... just chattin. I'll make a note to send and add to my profile a a codepen of what I'm talking about. It's a template I like to call... it has no name because it's just HTML and CSS! Whoever made HTML and CSS can take the credit.
But that's just me talking and it's selfish. If it works for you then it's fantastic! I'll keep an eye on your codepen because I'm still curious.
Unless it's something your client doesn't wish to share I don't see why you're secretive about your work. Looking at your post it seems you're very proud of your creations.
And while using grid frameworks is restrictive it's absolutely not like leaving the scaffolding on permanently. If you do that it's immediately visible by any passer-byes. Layperson visitors will have zero idea that a particular grid framework was used even if they viewed a source code.