TurboGears 2.3 removes pylons, and rewrite everything on top of a core which would make possible to have something which is a micro framework. This means it doesn't provide additional features like the template engine or the caching layer but can be replaced with whatever library you want. I personally don't mind at all writing properly structured XHTML, because I feel like, like you said, control, I can check, okay, this is exactly right. It's probably a personal preference, but I like it.