Amen! I've been railing against this as well for some time (with a minimalist project of my own - elefantcms.com), and wow is there ever resistance in certain parts of the PHP community to ideas like this.

Reading "quick" start tutorials like this (http://packages.zendframework.com/docs/latest/manual/en/zend...) is just depressing, and it's a big reason why droves of developer continue the exodus to other languages. PHP libs and frameworks should not emulate Java.

Sometimes I think PHP needs a _why to add some whimsy to the community and encourage people to break the mould, but they'd probably be dismissed as someone who "doesn't understand design patterns" or some other BS...

Thank you for writing this.