I liked Yii too, until I had to switch to Laravel for a new client. While Laravel is missing a few features baked in, like generators and admin tools, 95% of Laravel is way better designed and documented than Yii.

The only worthwhile point I still see in favor of Yii is its ORM can generate fewer, albeit more complicated, queries when eagerly loading nested objects. (OTOH, I encountered some ugly pagination bugs last summer when doing that...)