Just what is a "Model" supposed to be in CI?

[eluser]Chrisbloom7[/eluser]
[quote author="BrianDHall" date="1254255178"]CI is about productivity, not about forcing its opinions and principles on you. If you want to be forced to use all the tools available - whether you want to or not - CI really isn't the right framework for you whatsoever.[/quote]

This is why I came to CI after trying it first in Rails. The Configuration over Convention in Rails can be limiting when it comes to complex database schemas and unconventional data objects. (Side note: read 'Enterprise Rails' if you want info on how to effectively work around these conventions.)

For whatever reason, I never came across DMZ in my search for an ORM solution for CI. It does sound like what I was after at the time, so I will have to give it another go.

Just to clarify, I didn't mean I would rather build a new framework from scratch every time I need to build an application. Clearly the benefit of a framework is that it's already built and ready to go. My point was that at the time I was evaluating CI, I could find nothing in it that didn't do what I could do with my own ever-growing library of helper functions and classes, existing tools (like Smarty), and/or a few lines of code to route friendly URLs to physical controller classes. CI simply didn't give me any upper hand, specifically when what I was looking for was robust ORM capabilities. If DMZ does all that, then CI deserves another round of experimentation.

FWIW, the CI documentation may well be the culprit here. The examples were extremely basic, and suited more to building a small blogging utility then a real-world enterprise application. If there was a site for CI enterprise recipes, then I never found it, and the existing documentation definitely didn't give any clues for where to go for advanced material.

In any case, thank you for the very comprehensive answer.