Legitimate point-- at the same time, conventions help you get stuff done. They way I solved that in Sails is by federating the monolithic framework logic into smaller modules that can be disabled or overridden (see http://sailsjs.org/#!/features)

Working on going further down this approach w/ machines- effectively a container layer on top of JavaScript functions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72jI0dQx7pw)