Can anyone please point me in the direction of an open source project on Github that can showcase to me the 'elegance' of all these other programming languages that have the scale and adoption of some of the more well-known PHP community pieces?

I feel like so much of the bias towards PHP is either an unfair comparison (language to 'rails') or a bad taste left in the mouth because the person worked with a nasty domain specific language like Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, etc.

PHP is like pop music; there is a lot of it and 'true' artists think it's beneath them. Nevertheless the public demands and craves it, and most of the big web applications that are open source run on PHP.

If you feel like PHP is a blight on the world, by all means go out there and disrupt the community by launching something that gets widespread adoption the way PHP software has.