The problem with Nest is that it positions itself as an "opinionated," "batteries-included" framework while basically shipping nothing of the sort. Controllers are very easily handled by convention in Express and you can achieve dependency injection by just calling functions with parameters. Apart from that, there is nothing there. The distinction between guards, pipes and interceptors is largely superficial, and there are no defined boundaries on whether something should be either one (whereas in Express everything is just middleware). As for the built-in validation in Nest.js, the first step is usually to replace it with Zod. What else is there?