Other PHP frameworks lack some or most of these features: some are either very opinionated and rigid (Yii, Cake) huge and sparsely documented (Zend 2) or just old and approaching abandonment (Codeigniter, Kohana).
To a newbie, would you recommend Symfony, or Laravel?
Thanks!
Laravel is basically a wrapper around Symfony, to make it simpler and easier. A newbie might prefer to use that, but at some point after feeling comfortable with the basics like MVC, ORM, etc. you will definitely want to move to the more professional Symfony.
Be sure to check out Jeffrey Way's Laracasts, it's a really good site offering tutorials mostly for newbies.
The Yii programmers designed it with performance in mind. I can understand that you find it opinionated, but in my opinions the pros outweigh the cons.
The only worthwhile point I still see in favor of Yii is its ORM can generate fewer, albeit more complicated, queries when eagerly loading nested objects. (OTOH, I encountered some ugly pagination bugs last summer when doing that...)
Just went to the Symfony site for my first time, to have a look. OK, I'll install it ... requires use of Alpha software (Composer) to install? Also, they tell you to pipe that script straight through PHP - don't appear to be any sha hash sums given or anything. Doesn't seem terribly mature and well-designed so far.