The only benefit you've mentioned is writing less code. Which just proves my original point about Laravel being for people who want to get things done as fast as possible with the minimum effort possible, regardless of how much sense it makes.

>Consider Django. There, you explicitly define properties, but link them to the type of database column they'll use. Then, you can generate a migration based upon the model, and then run that migration. I really like that pattern. Removes tedium of writing migrations, preserves ability to modify the migrations, and makes things explicit.

This is exactly what Symfony with Doctrine does, and it's the correct way to do it. The benefits vastly outweigh the "drawback" of having to write slightly more code.