modern PHP? I would contend the OP is still a hipster, but at least he's pointing out that fashionable programming is really toxic for the industry as a whole. Boring technology is good because the ordinary, standard thing is meant to be exactly that, ordinary and standard. Leave the breaking changes, feature churn, evangelising, endlessly-revised howto articles, missing/outdated documentation, etc. where it belongs -- in the "innovative" software.