to scaffold an app in php, `vim index.php`
And actually, for most cases, yes using a framework is a better choice for nearly any skilled team with PHP: it's too easy to get it wrong, and now you have a massive security breach. See any exploit database for examples.
Maybe you were joking, but to call editing an index.php file a scaffold is scary (although highly profitable for me!)
Is it really? Personally, I've found that many of the projects which hired those sorts of developers either have little budget to start with, or have little budget left for a 'version 2' or 'clean up version 1' effort, because they spent most of it on the earlier garbage. Certainly plenty of work available to do that sort of clean up, but it doesn't strike me as 'highly profitable' on the whole.
Again, I only do these projects as moonlighting, this isn't my primary source of income. People contact me to fix their sites based on referrals and they know my rate before they contact me. I don't go out of my way to scour craigslist/odesk/whatever for jobs.