Pretty much sums up how I feel about most of the big frameworks (Zend in particular, but also Symfony and CakePHP). The problem of over-engineering isn't just related to the big PHP frameworks - the same problem exists in Python and Ruby. At its core, web development is about taking some user input, validating it, throwing it in a database, and displaying it again (perhaps slightly modified) to users. That's a fairly…
Ideally, a framework would have some basic elements and then additional components that can be included if required by a project but aren't core to the framework.