If you like Hiawatha, you should take a look at Banshee (https://www.banshee-php.org/). A secure PHP framework made by the same person as Hiawatha. A good alternative for Drupal, Wordpress and other pieces of spaghetti code.
Yeah I like it but I have tended to prefer to use static pages for the very reasons mentioned. I'll have to try it again sometime. I really wish Hugo would explain why he took it MIT though... as I've been working hard at what I call gnu'izing my stack.