I don't disagree. I was responding to the sarcastic comment about PHP, not really trying to address using it for a start up. Our start up used it as well. It's not the sexiest or most fun environment, but it works and it's the devil I know.
I spent the start of 2008 migrating an agency off CodeIgniter - it definitely improved their projects afterwards (developer training helped too, but not as much as a well-designed framework did for code reuse).
What gets me is CodeIgniter is how I was writing PHP code back in 2003-2004, 4 years after picking up the language as a hobby. And people still think writing it like that is a good idea.