If you completely disagree that's fine, move on to something else then - no hard feelings either way I hope. Just don't assume we just created this at random. Dan's remark was spot on, we chose the way we handle namespaces and autoloading very deliberately and we'll take the time to explain our motivations if you ask. But if you come in telling us that our setup sucks because we should be all-something because product X has that as well: don't expect we'll spend any time on you. There are lots of others with a more open-minded approach whom our time is far better spent on, and of course especially those actively helping out being the community you refer to.
I mean, if you were developing a new social network site, would you try to seed it with the Amish?
The only thing that I keep wishing for is that the whole 'new school' PHP 5.3+ gets something similar to Ruby's gems and having more high quality code that lives outside of frameworks.
(That's no criticism towards FuelPHP at all - just seeing that you guys are writing some 'good PHP code' it might be worth considering if it wouldn't be great when some of it was available outside of FuelPHP as well.)
We intend to create a repository for packages and classes installable through Oil directly into your Fuel install. At this time we are still using a single Github profile to fork any repo into that will be available through Oil package install: https://github.com/fuel-packages (install the packages without the "fuel-" prefix as their name)
You have to worry about your application being compatible with the version installed on the server and all sorts of other madness. Through this incredibly simple system (which will shortly become more powerful with its own interface) we can basically just install a package into your application in the same way most people would normally download, unzip, etc.
php oil install foo
Then add it to git, push and you're all good. Otherwise you have to run around installing dependencies and all sorts of other junk.
http://blog.stuartherbert.com/php/beyond-frameworks/
I hope you find it useful.
A lot of people are complaining, and saying things like we don't use namespaces properly. My response: Then don't use the framework. I started the framework because no current framework met my needs. Here are some of the reasons I did not simply use an existing framework:
CodeIgniter - Slow to evolve, requires a lot of code for simple things, nothing autoloaded (don't even try to mention the autoload config file.
Symfony2 - Over-complication of menial tasks, kind of slow.
CakePHP - Slowest (php) framework known too man, bloated, need I say more?
Zend - Slow, bloated.
Yii - Just don't generally like the syntax.
Kohana - There isn't much I don't like about Kohana actually...other than its not PHP 5.3 yet (not going into specifics on why this is bad).
DooPHP - Not full-featured-enough.
I also wanted things like HMVC (i know some of the above support it), Modular Routing and a few other things.
To the guy that said he was turned off by the Html class: if you don't want it, don't use it, stop whining.