Since when did something need to have novel features or ideas in order to be productive?

I'll counter that one of the main reasons PHP became such a used language (other than ease of deploy) is exactly the reasons you dislike it. There are multiple ways to do things - that coincide with the ways you do things in many other languages (which it steals from).

You dont have to learn anything radically new to use it, and that makes it very easy to do things quickly.