Laravel is somewhat based on Django (at least that is what I recall reading, I can't seem to find the link to it though)
PHP isn't too bad, but then again, I've never written a 100 thousand line app and tried to manage it too.
If you want to, start building it. People will use it, simply because there are millions of PHP "developers" out there.
Thing is though, Python is just so much easier to use (and people are realizing this slowly), so why not just contribute your valuable/limited time to Django itself?