Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it was created from the View perspective of MVC. PHP in my mind is equivalent to the special language of a template processor library of some other more general language.
I strongly disagree with your implication that it's only useful as a presentation layer, however. Some quirky syntax doesn't at all make it an incapable language; the real problem in my eyes is there's no one go-to framework for MVC work, a la Rails or Django (there's no shortage of choices, but that's not necessarily a good thing).
I would say there's a lot of consensus around Symfony
Heck, the second Google hit for "php mvc framework" for me was a 2009 guide to writing your own (talk about not getting the point of a framework). There were two more pages in the top ten for PHP MVC framework comparisons.
Ha ha ha... yeah... writing your own php framework... who would do such a thing...
I understand why it's supposed to be a bad thing but I also think it helps to understand the principles involved in frameworks and the mvc pattern, and one way to do that is try to make your own. Then when you pick a real framework it won't seem like magic.
That's not what I meant. I meant that it was created from the perspective of a View. There's no other reason that php code has to be delimited with <?php ?>, other than it was originally designed to be embedded in html. This alone shows how the creators envisioned PHP to be used.