Simply put, the strength of PHP is also it's greatest failure. It's got a very low barrier for entry, but a very high learning curve for doing things correctly (efficiently, securely, etc...).

I know I've fallen into many of the traditional PHP traps simply due to what I call language laziness. "Why do it this way when the other way is so much faster". PHP allows you to do quite a few things wrong very quickly.

I'm a closet PHP fan, but not compared to "better" languages like Python.