I think what the OP was getting at was that frameworks can be good - saving you a lot of DIY and building on (theoretically) good practices. But all that potential code reuse and possibly elegance is problematic in PHP because that has to be rebuilt on every single request. Arguably many Java frameworks are even more convoluted than, say, Zend Framework, but the Java platform means there's less of a performance price to pay for the bloat of a framework vs any PHP framework with similar 'bloat' (hierarchy of classes, etc).

"Trim that fat"

The "fat" is something which is useful to a lot of people for development, it's just a performance hindrance (and far moreso than in other platforms).

That said, I've had some Java folks express some amazement at how fast PHP is, even when it's doing all the library loading and class instantiation on every page request. In multiple cases, they all expressed that they thought it would be far far slower, having grown used to "object creation is slow" in Java.