I like PHP as well, however it's the wrong language to build byzantine OO inheritance structures in. Yet, that's what new feature development seems primarily directed at: new OO functionality that adds a lot of complexity and new opportunities for developers to shoot themselves in the foot. Listening to PHP core developers' presentations, I get the impression they're trying to imitate Java.

The per-request execution model can be played as an incredible strength, but the moment some framework comes along, starting off by loading all of its code, then instantiating a myriad classes, subclasses, traits, and other crap just to serve a simple request - that's where slowness and bugginess comes from.

I think simple objects do work well in PHP, together with judicious use of the powerful array data structure, anonymous functions, and on-demand code loading.