Serious questions.
I've been using PHP professionally for 5 years now, haven't once needed either of these "deeper issues" to be solved, so I'd appreciate it if people would stop bitching about the language and actually explain why PHP is bad (with examples).
Does that convince you?
2) because processing some HTTP requests can be a tad bit more complicated than "do a select from a database and substitute the values into a template"
2) Explain - seriously. To me this level of thing isn't the realm of PHP but rather the web server in front of it. If someone is doing something that requires multi-threaded programming, they clearly don't know what PHP is used for and they chose the wrong tool. Their choice doesn't invalidate PHP for it's intended use case.
2) I'm not sure what this statement has to do with anything.
Well then use ===, but when a string contains numbers then php will do the type conversion for you. It's a convenience.
It may not work correctly by your definition but it's pretty intuitive and useful the way it is.