I love and use many parts of symfony2 (as well as other high-quality libraries); however, that doesn't change my highly negative opinion about the core PHP language. It is still a far cry from desirable, elegant, fluent, or expressive.

If you need to learn a framework then PHP loses simplicity, one of the few things its got going for itself. And if your needs validate the use of a framework, you'd probably be better off with RoR or Django.