Wielding a master's sword does not a swordmaster make. Surely you've seen enough RoR and Django projects to know that.
Some people will say that something not written in a strongly typed language is not well engineered. If it's not compiled, it's not efficient. This is just programming snobbery. For what it's worth, I was that kid in high school, except back then it was Perl. That's how I learned. Something that makes it even easier? That just creates more programmers. Without shitty programmers, we'd be paid a lot less.
I talk a lot of smack about PHP and JavaScript, but these terrible languages have brought more people to programming than any other languages.
Remember, both PHP and JavaScript were serious tar-pits ten years ago.
JavaScript has made enormous strides in that time, the cultural shift is unbelievable. People went from writing absolutely terrible client-side code, to using frameworks (Moo, Scriptaculous at first, later jQuery, RequireJS) to using it server-side for serious applications. It's gone from complete anarchy to highly civilized. There's some things JavaScript does very well now, and in an elegant way mostly free of quirky tradition and/or obnoxious anachronisms.
Meanwhile PHP has only degraded. It's improved, technically, but the community is now hyper-fragmented. Best practices are routinely ignored. Frameworks don't inter-operate even on the most basic level. There's no leadership. There's opposition to even the most obvious improvements to PHP, like deprecating components that are doing nothing but holding PHP back. Killing off `mysql_query`, for example, is absolutely imperative, but it's going to be a bitter fight.
Secondly, the reason some programmers are more expensive than others is because they're more efficient.
Who would you rather have? Six PHP programmers that flail away for a month and ship a buggy but usable application? Or maybe two Ruby or Python developers that ship a unit-tested, well engineered application?
The two developers will cost you about the same as the six others if they're top-notch, but they will not make the same mistakes and they will not stumble into every potential pitfall along the way to the solution.