"The number of times I got bitten in the ass or just wasted time trying to figure out how the "magic" in Zend worked was infuriating."

This is true for all frameworks in all languages. Instead of doing the Unix thing and providing well-behaved libraries that do one thing well, people build a pile of opinionated spaghetti. To quote HN user mahmud:

"snippet -> program -> application -> library [STOP HERE]-> framework [GO BACK]->platform [GO FUCK YOURSELF]"