Fluketyfluke

Configuring the settings doesn't help with the problem of it being too opinionated. Changing the settings wasn't the problem. The fact that there were settings was. For instance, there really shouldn't be border-radius or box-shadow on .panel at all. That should be up to the designer/front-end person/whoever to add. That's a very subjective property and has nothing to do with the basics of its layout or how it functions. Having a bunch of declarations of box-shadow: 0; all over the place is just clutter. That's just one example of many. I should clarify, I am not anti-Bootstrap. I use bits and pieces of it all the time. It's just not very good for building a large, scale websites that serves many purposes. And I can't design every page and app that comes my teams way, so I'm glad that there's something my coworkers can use that won't look like an unthawed caveman (from 2002) built it.

I use it but only because the backend team insists on it because it's all they know. I argued against using it, but they were very insistent. We were working on a huge site and the site had already been designed and I was the one who had to get Bootstrap to conform to the design. Guess what? That didn't go so well! Bootstrap is opinionated about a lot of stuff and ties together disparate things that shouldn't be tied together. I think if Bootstrap didn't make opinions about colors, fonts, border-radius, box-shadow and the like it would be more flexible. To that end it should just focus on display, positioning, and necessary tie-ins to the JavaScript. There is a way to make Bootstrap more useful if you are working with a design, though. Switch it's class names to placeholders (Sass version) and then extend as needed. This doesn't necessarily cut down on the bloat, but if you're working on a large site or application a larger CSS file is on the lower end of your worries.