I'm not the poster but the last time I looked into Cake it's internal code was just an utter mess. A lot of the mess is from it's continued support of PHP4 and PHP5 which have a lot of incompatibilities in their object models.

I haven't used Symphony in ages, but it was originally a fork of a project called Mojavi (which I used to work on). It was designed as a pure PHP5 MVC framework with a heavy emphasis on being easy to override or modify any of the components. I don't know how true it's held to that these days, but the original code base was pretty slick.

That said. I don't use either, I've got a little 300 line OOP MVC wrapper I wrote that serves my purposes. But if I were going to look at a framework today it would be Zend or Symphony.