The problem with this is, when you pull in new developers - it takes them weeks or months to understand everything. Whereas a Laravel app, they need maybe a few days at best to figure out what design principles you're using and what style, and where you put repos/models and such, but then they're good to go.

I hate working on code where some systems engineer from the 80's thinks they're big and bad and can code an awesome website using just propel + plain php and then expect every new dev to just learn it and love it as much as they do.