I feel you, but it's just a matter of finding the right circles. I would never apply for a job just because it says 'php', you have to dig deeper. At this point in my career, I would never accept a freelance gig like the one you described, because I know how that goes.

You don't need to try other languages, do it only if you want to. If you wanna save time just take my word, Symfony2 has nothing to envy to Django or Rails (I have used them and also digged into their architecture). In fact, it's more modern and better designed.

I'll leave these links here, you might find them useful:

- http://www.phptherightway.com/ (general advice)

- http://getcomposer.org/ (composer, the dependency manager)

- https://packagist.org/ (the main composer repository)

- https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards/tree/master/accepte... (accepted conventions)

- http://www.slideshare.net/fabpot/dependency-injection-with-p... (if you liked MVC, DI will blow your mind)

- http://fabien.potencier.org/article/50/create-your-own-frame... (an amazing tutorial on how to create a framework, it will let you understand it inside out)

- http://symfony.com/download (what should become your next framework)

- http://silex.sensiolabs.org/ (minimalistic version of Symfony2, it's called Silex, and might be useful for small websites)

If you still want to try something else, try something that has nothing to do with all this, like Clojure. For example, Ruby/Rails is the same as PHP/Symfony2, you won't learn much. I jumped into Rails and just started coding, because I already knew web development, I wasn't impressed, the differences were mostly syntactic sugar, monolithic vs decoupled, and issues like the lack of interfaces and type hinting. But Clojure? Mind blown. I'm gonna spend my next summer learning more Clojure, because I already know it's my perfect language, but it's hard and full of new concepts. Meanwhile, php/Symfony2/nginx is my perfect stack for web development.