I too wish more people in the PHP world would use parameters, but alas, your second paragraph sums up the common mentality. If its still going to make money, why go to the effort? Personally I love sending a query with an object and just let the engine do the work.

I see this sort of thing on a daily basis, but it's not from PHP developers but our "lead" Delphi developer. I've tried to convince him of the benefits of parameter based queries, but believes that it would be a performance hit (performance for him maybe, he'd have to struggle to learn something new).