Kohana proves its worth not by it's public face but by developers downloading it and building their own apps. If you're one to judge a book by its cover, than perhaps Kohana isn't for you!

The Kohana website uses itself for the main site, DokuWiki for the docs, Wordpress for the tutorials (it used to be non-official, hosted and run by a community member), Vanilla for the forum, Redmine for the projects directory, Trac for main version control and Github for latest development (unless I'm mistaken on any point). To me that says that the Kohana team would rather just Get Things Done than re-implement tried and tested systems based on their framework. That is after all what it is, just a framework.

I don't think you're being brutal at all, just perhaps a little blinkered.