Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, now that I have had the experience of leading teams of JavaScript developers, I know first hand the value of building a project on top of a common base that is readily familiar, well documented and easy to pick up by outsiders. Yes, but choose wisely. :) Back in the late '90s I worked for a company that had their own home-grown Java Web application framework. It was conceptually clean, ran fast, an…
I worked somewhere with a similar brilliant framework. It was so much easier, etc., etc. Similar sort of genius auto-loading thing. XML/XSLT. Could slap stuff together fast. I could make those XSLTs sing man. I made a pivot table out of XSLT, no shit. It was amazingly fast compared to the IE7 javascript engine. Orders of magnitude on masses of data, it actually was amazing. Know how many times Ive used my crazy mad X…
Domain specific knowledge doesn't cause this. If you are limited by how much of it you have or don't have then you have a long way to come as a programmer... having used a language or framework before is only really useful so that you don't get snagged by gotchas or weird and wonderful eccentricities of the framework or language.
In reality getting employed is more difficult without experience on a CV, but if you are intelligent and can get an interview its not usually a problem - smart people know, or can be taught quickly, the lack of value specific experience has in most contexts (i.e. anything where you aren't just urgently crunching something out of the door). :)