The real problem with PHP was always the standard library and its many caveats, outright bugs, and inadequacies, rather than the PHP language itself (there's a few language issues as well, but I found those less painful than the standard library).

A few of these things have been fixed, but by and large the situation has remained unchanged for a long time. It's not an easy problem due to compatibility reasons; adding new language features and such is comparatively easy.