What I've found is that as you try to make a grid that is robust and works for a huge middle-ground of use cases, it really is tough. Bootstrap has a lot of strange nuance, but a lot of the time it's "one of the only ways" to make it work "almost every time" with CSS and HTML shortcomings and browser oddnesses.

There are smaller grids, simpler grids, etc, but none are as robust and generalized as Bootstrap/Foundation. These have to be as close to "one size fits all" as they can.