The toolset itself has the weirdest gaps. You can get to 80-90% of a website design really quickly with the standard angular+bootstrap or whatever. But when a client wants it to do "Feature X" that is in one of the gaps then you're stuck spending hours trying to either hammer the problem into one of the frameworks or roll your own solution. And it's very hard to explain how "Feature X" took nearly half the time of standard "Features A-W".
I don't think that it's fair to blame the frameworks. You should see it the other way 'round: They save you 80% of your time. The 80/20 rule is real (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle), 20% of the whole work needs 80% of your time.
If you have problems explaining why features need their time, it's not about your frameworks, it's about explaining the clients in all honesty what happens. Or, if you want to get paid enough, you simply factor in some risks into your budget planning and up your budget. They don't have to know that you only needed 2h to get nearly everything up and running and 6h for that one sneaky feature. Use asymmetric information (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...) to your advantage. It's not about the toolset, it's about your mindset.
I have to disagree. In my experience, the frameworks get me to 80% completion but I'm not spending the next 20% on achieving completion. I'm spending orders of magnitude more than that fighting the framework, trying to make it function the way my product needs to function.
In other words, all of the time saved to get to 80% is lost, and then some, because the framework can't do what my project needs.
I've seen this time and time again, with every framework I have ever used.
I've used Ember.js in the past and must admit that it got in the way and the whole team was magnitudes slower than it should be, although I would also see the bad codebase we had to build upon was a big factor of this, so I can relate to that.
But I've never experienced this problem on projects where I'm able to choose my tools. I use Django and Vue.js with webpack and I can estimate the time constraints for each feature accurately using that stack which is most important for me.
Maybe you've used too opinionated frameworks in the past. If that is the case, loosely coupled frameworks like ampersand.js or very flexible solutions like Vue.js will be a pleasure for you.
In regards to the Pareto Principle: The 80/20 rule means that you need 80% of your time to finish those 20% outside the scope of your framework, not 20%, so your observation fits with this.
It's more like spending 20% of the time on 80% of the features (the standard ones), then 80% of the time on 20% of the features (the details, hard stuff and integration).
It's not about "blaming" anything. But the fact is that software development is much harder to make an accurate estimate for, in many ways, than a highway project and this is because the tools we have available to use are not as mature as they could be.
