True, that's why I built mine as a library I can reuse in my projects :) I'm still eating my own dogfood, but doing it with a framework approach.

> If you're working with models (that, namely, are 1:1 with DB rows) stale object problems

One of my common patterns is to implement cache at the service layer, not the data layer - and all data operations are performed via services. This allows caching of actual business-domain computed values, not necessarily just db rows (in fact, more often than not, caching just db rows is just a waste of memory with little to no advantage). As a quick example, imagine a purchase order with a header, a list of products and a state associated with each line - it is trivial to cache the whole purchase order info, including runtime calculations such as lead time per product, and invalidate the cache at each update operation on the different tables that may represent this purchase order. Services would have methods manipulating "purchase order" (and keeping cache state) and not ad-hoc code messing with OrderHeaderModel, OrderDetailModel, OrderProductStatusModel, etc.