Perhaps I've missed the point, but I'd always expect a "minimalist" framework of any type contain less code in itself but require more application code. That's practically the point.

You have to write more boilerplate, but at least you know what all that code is doing because the framework is so easy to understand. By contrast, a more heavyweight framework lets you wrote less boilerplate because there's a helper function for every situation, but then your application code is filled with lots of magical calls into the framework, so to understand your code you need to look at a different bit of the framework documentation for every line.

That's not to I say I think either is better or worse, just that those are the expected trade offs.