I would take a serious look at Django. You can use it as scaffolding and get rid of pieces as you write you own, the first to go will be the use of the automated admin site, and I find myself writing a custom pieces across the board.
However, being able to rapidly deploy a prototype has been priceless time and time again, and they have the basics that you need down and well tested.
If you don't like ORM, or find yourself writing a lot of custom queries for performance, that is fine. I would still use an ORM now and customize some queries for performance later. The reason? Speed of building your app...I think not writing the DB code saves me about 20% of my time.
I used to be always against using frameworks since they were massive, crappy, and relied on so much magic you didn't know what was going on behind the scenes. I am really glad I went with Django, it saved me from writing almost the identical feature set.
However, being able to rapidly deploy a prototype has been priceless time and time again, and they have the basics that you need down and well tested.
If you don't like ORM, or find yourself writing a lot of custom queries for performance, that is fine. I would still use an ORM now and customize some queries for performance later. The reason? Speed of building your app...I think not writing the DB code saves me about 20% of my time.
I used to be always against using frameworks since they were massive, crappy, and relied on so much magic you didn't know what was going on behind the scenes. I am really glad I went with Django, it saved me from writing almost the identical feature set.