In the hands of an experienced UNIX programmer, PHP was a good, small, fast solution for writing web applications.
However, using a framework is the worst kind of toxic advice one could provide: they are slow, bloated, and completely unnecessary. On top of that, best of luck debugging one when things go awry. And one learns nothing using someone else's idea of how things should work. Why should anyone accept someone else's limitations? I refuse.
Where I drew the line is when creating a database connection forced me to instantiate an object: I hate object-oriented programming with a burning passion because of its complexity and inefficiency. When that happened, I knew it was time to ditch PHP for the R programming language, or even write a web application in good old shell and AWK and making it available through (fast) CGI...
