That sounds like a wrong configuration and/or architecture. Symfony is in my experience fast if you follow the best practices.
Maybe you should find out the bottlenecks before you blame Symfony.
> just DON'T do long running processes with PHP.
We run long-running workers just fine.
> You want to enable a module? Good luck finding the right php.ini.
That depends on your OS. In Debian/Ubuntu you just run phpenmod module and restart the service.
I don't know... Your criticism seems to stem from not looking at the issues closely, or maybe you were stuck in a really old, abandoned system. But that woukd have been ugly regardless of language.