Symfony is the worst thing that could've happened to PHP. Dependency injection with varying degrees of XML/YAML madness everywhere. It's terribly slow and pretty much unusable w/o several caching layers in front. I can honestly say that I hate this framework with a passion, and the language too. PHP's core and a big part of the community is copying features and methodologies from Java, but they will never get close to its performance, nor its functionalities. I left the ecosystem when PHP 5.1 was around... I left for good.

This! Symfony is so wrong, i actually can't believe it. First version was kind of rails, replacing all that ruby awesomeness with PHP madness. Newer Versions suddenly want to be like Java only 1000times slower.

I won't say it's the worse thing, it did bring some good and really help drive plenty of new projects towards being OOP. I'm no fan of it either! My point is that the code is structured! Now is the framework architecture good? Whoops, that's another discussion, and I can't likewise stand the layering upon layering of components and configuration nightmare.

I think that Symfony is SpringMVC for poor, and slower, and crappier.

Your right, its not hard, but it is on the scale of how easy it is to write bad php.