How is this data useful to someone building a web application? I have used several of these frameworks ,alteast the jvm based ones, and I can tell you that it is like comparing apples to oranges. Case in point, Wicket, which I have been using for several years, is a component oriented framework with a rich ready to use pre-built components. If on the other hand you are using netty, you are left to reinvent pretty much everything . Based on your configuration, it may be that wicket is returning the response from cache. Compojure and wicket serve different business use cases.
Like any set of benchmarks, using the raw number without taking into account externalities such as those you listed would be a poor indicator of the best framework for your needs.
That said, if you need serving power, the fact that some some solutions can literally serve 100x more requests than others, and for likely less than 100x slowdown in development time and effort, may matter.
It really depends on what you're optimising for. If you're aiming for being able to build features quickly / elegantly using higher level abstractions, these benchmarks may be less interesting.
If on the other hand, you're building an application where performance is key, it's useful to know how much overhead your framework is adding. We have a real time bidding application which falls into this category, so these benchmarks quite interesting to me.
