Yeah, I wanted to understand how they worked, so I stayed away from any framework.

I have since moved over to using Theano, Lasagne & nolearn. However, I almost find it just as hard, because it's so easy to step wrong and get errors, and so hard to debug. In addition, Lasagne & nolearn doesn't exactly have great documentation of tutorials available (they have some, but I like to try out many tutorials to get perspective and get a proper understanding).

I'm far from good enough to turn my implementations into frameworks :p