If you go with frameworks, it is easier, better, faster, stronger!
No, really. With a well-established framework you cut down your development time, you know that hard stuff has already been thought about, and you can just do what your app needs to do, without doing things that every app needs to do.
I'm a Ruby guy, so I'd vote for Rails (big) or Sinatra (small). I did work in PHP and it was just... ick. If you swing the Python way, Django (big) or CherryPy (small) would probably be the suggestions to try.
The disadvantages, not many. It is a bit slower than not using a framework, obviously. But not by much. And if there is something that a framework does not support, it can get hairy. However, there's really not much you can want that e.g. Rails does not do.
As for being suspicious of other people's code, there's really no need. It is open-source, bunch of people look at it and if there's something seriously wrong it would have gotten fixed a long time ago. If you are still suspicious, you can join them. It is a better investment of your time to help debug an existing framework than design, develop, test and debug one from scratch.