As a friend of mine pointed out, PHP's problem is not that it's improving, but that bad things continue to happen. C wrappers continue to be thinner than tissue paper, error-handling routines continue to segfault, and bizarre security holes continue to be found.

"Decent object-oriented structure" doesn't help when the language still has so many primitive types. Namespaces don't help when most of the built-in and standard libraries live in the global namespace, C-style. The runtime is still creaky and inefficient.

There's not really any hate these days, just eye-rolling. You could be doing better things, but you're deliberately choosing not to, and harming nobody but yourself in the process.