Drupal needs you to conform, a framework will conform to you.

An answer on stackoverflow to the endless question “should I choose Drupal or Foo” gets the whole problem with many Drupalprojects in one sentence:

Drupal needs you to conform, symfony will conform to you - choose whichever you want.

I would refrase that as:

Drupal needs you to conform, a framework will conform to you - choose whichever you want.

Now, that would not be a big problem, if you have that freedom: the freedom to conform. But many projects (clients) have certain demands, or expectations.

On those projects, you often cannot conform. And even if you can conform, you often should not conform; not every case is best served with The Drupal Way[tm].

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do I want to conform to The Drupal Way?
• Can I conform to The Way of The Drupal?
• Will my client allow us to conform to the Drupal Way?

If the answer to any of these is yes, the next step would be to find out, what That Drupal Way[tm] is; that Drupal Way often needs to be found out and described to in great detail.

If the answer to any of these questions is no, certainly not, you might want to not use Drupal at all. Or, more correct, not use a CMS at all, but learn a real framework.