We Rewrote Our Entire Application in PHP Before Launch

It's not clear from the article that you didn't have that with Play. A lot of people like PHP for the feeling of direct control, but of course that often comes at the expense of the power of higher level abstractions. Unless you use a framework, in which case you're back to the unease of "simply building models and controllers on top of it." Sounds like you were just more comfortable with PHP than Java, which is a perfectly good reason to rewrite.