"Nobody can hate something as strongly as somebody who's spend way too much time looking at it". Wrong. You can look at something and not hate it as much as someone who just hates PHP because he/she didn't like the syntax or it didn't fit their needs.

"Those frameworks and ORMs [...] are generally obfuscatory at best". This is your opinion, not a fact. Don't state it as a fact, unless you've got concrete examples to prove it.

"downright maliciously bad (CodeIgniter [...])". Another opinion with no facts to support it.

"glacially inefficient frameworks". Another opinion with no facts supporting it.

"it wasn't going to work for us". Good. It works for many other people, you happen to be in a different group. More power to you.

"psychotic language decisions". Another opinion stated without any facts or even examples.

"slapdash internals". As someone who has developed plugins for PHP, I have to ask you what exactly can be qualified as "slapdash", to the point where it brings PHP's internal code quality below similar products?

"blatant encouragement of idiotic programming practices": Please, do share with us which "idiotic programming practices" does PHP, the language, encourage, and other similar languages do not? Otherwise, this is another opinion without any facts to support it.

"application structure wasn't essentially actively discouraged". For the thousandth time, learn to provide supporting evidence to your arguments.

"the solution to any data storage problem seems to be <<MORE ARRAYS!>>". This statement makes no sense. Here's a counter example: if I had 1TB worth of data which I wanted to save to a MySQL cluster, I would _not_ need more arrays than to store the same data to a single MySQL instance, because the storage layer has nothing to do with in-memory representation of an item (except when the programmer decides to make the two similar, but that has nothing to do with the language). Therefore, your statement is false.

"a sufficiently advanced developer, finds themselves fighting it as much as using it". Please provide some evidence. As a counter-example, I can point to Facebook, which probably has "sufficiently advanced developers" that are not fighting with PHP.

"I went back to Java". I hope you stay there.

In conclusion, I'd like to say that, given your unsupported claims, you seem to not have reached a sufficient level of proficiency with PHP. You did say you spent a lot of time looking "at it", but that doesn't necessarily imply that you understood PHP. All the rhetoric in your comment makes for a decent rant, but it will only appeal to similarly-minded people, who hate PHP because of random, half-brained personal reasons.

I wish you a happy life, full of hatred for PHP.