Ask HN: Web Framework for light and fast development

What about lumen (http://lumen.laravel.com/)? It is a micro framework (inherited from Laravel). If you need more features, you can easily scale up your project to use Laravel because Lumen uses the same structure.

I'd suggest Express (http://expressjs.com/). It's easy to learn with a good feature set and still very minimalist.

I like to use Gulp with gulp-file-include, full static front-end optimized build process.

I really like being able to always play with the build process to optimize the front-end only, Gulp rules.