With the invent of __autoload() it takes away plenty of bloat, and they can be very lean, and mean machines. They can save you plenty of time. In fact they actually are better because you can work on optimizing your objects extremely well without having to update 100x different objects because you are rewriting everything from scratch... Also make upgrading a breeze...

I would also suggest them in a large workgroup, where your always adding to the project, a good mvc framework will save you plenty down the road, doing everything completely custom for right now is IMHO not a good way to work, because it makes it much more difficult of a upgrade later. Even for a small, quick and dirty jobs I still like to use my framework, to save time, and ditch the learning curve of new objects. I can open any one of my projects and immediately know what's happening without having to remember how I created this wheel vs. my other ones. With a solid framework you can use the brawn of a 900 pound gorilla in your little mouse of a project. Which can help with anything from securing, optimizing, and simplifying your code. It's kinda like having a sudo development team. People spend hours on optimizing, testing, benchmarking, and securing every bit of code in frameworks. Its a valuable resource, why waste it...

Also, I've looked at many, many different frameworks, built my own, and contributed to others. And I can easily say that the code involved with frameworks is some of the most sophisticated, optimized, and cutting-edge stuff you will ever see in a php project these days. Good programmers can write up a site, but only Great programmers can create a framework they are willing to use more than once...

Just my 2 cents...