Though Joomla and WordPress indirectly pay most of my bills, now and then there are still customers who ask me to write a webapp from scratch: nowadays of course “from scratch” doesn’t mean anymore starting from a blank file; we are in the MVC/Active record pattern era and, although it’s still not mandatory, the use of some kind of framework is encouraged (or a collection of tools for the same purpose, at least).
I think I’m neither lazy nor scared but honestly, for small-medium webapps, I’m not able to find a good reason to start from scratch: I’d always use a CMS like Joomla (or WordPress for little things) even when it’s an oversized choice.
Do you need templates and their inheritance model? Authentication? ACL (sort of)? DB connection? Plugins? It’s all included and with MVC programming (Joomla 1.5.x has it and there are many others with the same features out there).
