Joel,
Considering the types of Flash sites you're talking about building, Flex is not
the solution you need. However, Flex is absolutely worth learning, if only to
expand your skillset which leads to making more money per hour. ;)
Out of all the frameworks you listed, only Gaia is for making the types of
websites you said you are making. The rest are application frameworks.
PureMVC, Mate and Cairngorm are primarily intended to work with Flex and any
support you seek on learning those frameworks will most likely come from Flex
developers and not Flash ones. They are important to learn if and when you
learn Flex.
Gaia AS3 is only 40k (AS2 is slightly smaller). I hate code bloat and have
spent a lot of effort keeping Gaia as lean as possible. There's even an option
to optimize the main.swf by removing any assets you aren't using in your site,
which can potentially decrease the file size down to 29k.
A lot of developers and designers making the transition from AS2 to AS3 have
found Gaia very helpful in that process, since it takes care of a lot of the
extra code that is so overwhelming, and gives you time to slowly acclimate to
the changes.
Gaia also has an active forum with over 800 members, a robust Wiki and
documentation, ASDocs, and I am available on the forums every day answering
questions.
If you're going to be at MAX, come check out my Gaia presentation on Tuesday at
4:00pm.
http://360max.wikispaces.com/Gaia+Framework
Cheers and good luck!
-Steven
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