"If you can muddle along with glacially inefficient frameworks (often with APIs that make core PHP seem not all that terrible for a time) and ORMs (personally, I don't use an ORM for anything, and credit where credit's due, PDO is actually a very reasonable solution), more power to you, but some of us (hi) have already been to that dance and realized it wasn't going to work for us."

Count me in as someone who took a look at the frameworks and said "no thanks". I think where the frameworks fail is that they always feel the need to go OO. PHP's design is pretty procedural in essence, because it's not a lot more than an HTTP wrapper with some useful procedures you can call. If you wrap that in an OO layer, by necessity you have to complicate things. I've found the best use of objects in PHP is in support of procedural request handler code. The only framework I use is ZF, because you can easily use it without buying into the whole MVC and routing paradigm.