I disagree. The developers of Wordpress are not "the average person". There are too many production sites that run on PHP to say it's garbage.
I mean nobody in the almost literal sense. Stack Overflow serves as a rough barometer of popularity and either Symfony users have no questions, use another support platform, or they don't make up a significant population.
The #1 problem with the PHP community is it's complete anarchy and filled with people that should not be developing web apps, or at least should not be developing the way they're going about it.
Maybe Symfony could fix that, but there's a lot of work to be done here.
I am specifically talking about Symfony2, by the way.
A great number of frameworks and CMSs are using Symfony2 components. Two popular ones are the http-kernel and http-foundation components.
Drupal is integrating several Symfony2 components.
Composer, the PHP package manager that has taken the community by storm, is using Symfony components.
eZ publish is integrating several Symfony2 components.
Joomla! adopted YAML, using a Symfony2 component.
Stating that Symfony2 is not widely used simply tells me you're not keeping up with the PHP community - which would be fine if you're not a PHP developer, but makes your statement not trustworthy.
edit: PHPUnit, the defacto standard PHP unit testing framework, also uses Symfony2's YAML component.
I can go on.
Nobody uses Drupal, or eZ Publish or Joomla. They just don't. There's good reasons for this, notably these are some really obnoxious platforms to build for, but that aside their impact on the PHP world at large is inconsequential.
PHP, by and large, consists of people slamming together applications from the ground up the same way they built them in the 1990s. It shouldn't be this way, and people should fix it through education and outreach, but I really don't see that happening on the scale that's required.
Also, if you think even a quarter of the PHP devs out there even know what a unit testing framework is, you're more of an optimist than I am.
You could probably build a competing CMS in, say Laravel 4, replace the plugin system with Composer packages or something similar, use Twig and PDO out of the box, and have a much more elegant and modern system that probably almost no one would use, unless the user experience was just as brainless as it is with Wordpress.
Which is also one reason why, I think, despite all the arguments in their favor, static site generators (which do get mentioned now and then as an alternative to WP) still have a while to go before they're ready for mainstream use. It's not enough that it's well coded, it has to be easy too, and easy wins out over pretty every time.
WordPress is being pushed only because the majority of web developers can tinker with PHP only.
I think you're forgetting that most of the people who use Wordpress aren't web developers at all, and most of the 'web developers' who use Wordpress probably can't code much, either, because they won't need to. The ease of the Wordpress install is something they advertise. Once you ever have to touch the code, yes, it's a nightmare, even if you're inured to the horrors of php code. Most 'web development' jobs with Wordpress involve the install, setting up themes, maybe editing the css and installing plugins (because even that is still more arcane than some non-technical bloggers and people want to deal with.)
The "low bar for entry" for PHP comes up as an epithet now and again, but if you're trying to increase the adoption of your particular language, having an application the plebs can run isn't necessarily a bad thing. Does anything similar exist in the Python or Ruby worlds yet, for which someone wouldn't be expected to know how to use a terminal, or handle git?
It is, I think, almost entirely down to being less of a hassle than anything else out there, and especially less of a hassle than anything not written in PHP. Call it laziness if you will, and I wouldn't entirely disagree with you.
PHP is like Perl blended with C and a whole lot of confusion.
Frameworks have made it "better" like ketchup improves the quality of prison food, but it's still terrible on the whole.
No, it does mean it's good. You're comparing opinion (everybody has one) with actual hard real world results (tons of major sites with million hits running on Wordpress and around 15% of the web too).