In the last few weeks I have come across three modules which touted 'responsive' designs, all of which uses the Bootstrap framework. One of them requires a bootstrap based theme to display correctly, whereas the other two loads their own bootstrap files.

Bootstrap is ok, but I am not really a big fan. It seems a bit big and heavy-handed for most sites that I do. I've been building sites with custom css or with a smaller lightweight framework (Pure).

I know I can customize bootstrap to only load certain components to make it more lightweight, but if the module makers are relying on the theme loading the framework, then that could possible break them, right? Also, if my theme is using one framework and the module loads another, in the end the site will be very bloated.

So, what's your opinion? Is bootstrap the de facto framework for DNN now? Should I just stop complaining and start using it?

I know a lot of the skinners in the DNN store are bragging on the fact that their skins are built with bootstrap. I checked some of the most popular, and there are themes that loads over 50,000 lines of CSS! Is that really a good thing? Can't it make the sites slow and bloated, and a bit of a hassle to customize?

I also don't like how most bootstrap sites looks similar. But I guess that's not really the fault of the framework, but due to lazy developing...

50000 line css files is too much. I bet lots of the css declarations are unused. These files need to be cleaned and trimmed. They are big because of laziness or because every time the page designer creates a new html element they just create a new css element to style it without thinking about reusing or organizing existing ones.

Some theme designers and module developers decide to load their own bootstrap files because they don't know or can't  guarantee the master DNN  theme is using the correct version of bootstrap. I guess they can compare versions and decide to load their own if they are different.  If they are using customized bootstrap files, they have no choice but to load their own.

Bootstrap is very popular and there are tons of samples, examples, books, blogs & video tutorials on it. DNN owners then can easily customize the used bootstrap theme because of the known conventions used.

There are tons of free and commercial bootstrap themes so it makes it easy to swap out the default ones without doing much work.

css and js files should be minimized, compressed and packaged together to minimize download time and bandwidth. Extra care and work should be directed to mobile site version because mobile devices have limited resources (cpu & memory) and bandwidth.