I have been bitten too by the abandoning of silex and symfony becoming more and more like a complex java beast. The zend framework 1 was once good with a simple abstraction but they turned java like too.

Nowadays i develop in laravel which is breeze to work with. A simple framework and you can choose whether to use it as simple as silex, full blown like symfony or somewhere between. I started using it like a silex with controller classes and migrated more and more to the symfony way, but still its really easy understandable for any new developer.