In a new post to his blog Samuel Folkes expresses some concerns with the PHP community - not in how strong it is but how it might be making things harder for those new to the language.
Please, don't get me wrong, I am not at all implying that the PHP community has gotten any weaker. In fact I think that it is strengthening at a rapid rate due mainly to the fact that the language itself is becoming more robust and mature. The issue I have however is that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to learn PHP. Just pure PHP.
He goes on to say that some of the concepts (higher level concepts at least) can overwhelm beginners and may even drive them away from the language all together. He suggests that current PHP developers and members of the community remember how it was when they started and "get back to their roots" and encourage the basics of the language.
Having said that, there is nothing wrong as such with frameworks and structured coding which can lead to very scalable applications and i don't think Samuel is directly bagging them out. But very few php applications i know need this kind of stuff....write your own basic framework for simple sites and you'll see that it can be scaled quite easily without bloated frameworks IMO
I suppose at the end of the day its still personal opinion... i admittadly am a little old school...