Good luck with that. My experience is that the only frameworks that don't get in your way on a complex project are the ones that do almost nothing to help, e.g. CGI::Application. As soon as a framework tries to make things easier by helping out with sessions, databases, page widgets, etc. people who are trying to do something unusual start banging their heads on it. This is not a Catalyst thing or a perl thing but rather a general software thing. Software problems are just not as easy to generalize into frameworks as we would like them to be.