Here's the thing - you're talking about something it's fairly obvious you don't know well at all.

"still doesn't have a ubiquitous package manager"? http://getcomposer.org

Ok I concede this might be less niche than I thought, it wasn't around when I last wrote PHP. Research error on my part.

What else have I failed to realise? I'm entirely willing to believe that I'm wrong, I have a vested interest in learning, not being right - I almost want to be proven that I'm wrong about PHP.

I think you may have failed to realize (as a lot of people have) that the language has evolved both in structure and in practice since you probably dropped it. Most of what people hate about PHP can be dealt with using a proper framework, autoloading and PDO (no more inline SQL queries ever), and most of the rest can be maneuvered around as with the gotchas of any language. Check out the Laravel community and look at Composer and take a look at what it's become if you're serious and it will become apparent that, while PHP still has its warts, it is entirely possible and practicable to use it and enjoy it, or at least not hate it.

I don't know how much exposure has to count for "experience" since i'm still a student but i've written code in perl, python, c++, java and php and so far I find things to like and things I can't stand about each of them.

Not everyone who works with PHP dislikes it. For some it's just a language which has some weird and unruly aspects which can be dealt with.

That's what you don't seem to be getting... people work with it, even people who work with other languages, and find that it happens to fit into a particular niche for them. They write libraries for it and expand it because they find the language useful and expect it to continue to be useful for the forseeable future. And it doesn't suck as badly as it used to.

Composer?