[ponyfleisch]

I'm not convinced that this approach flattens the learning curve significantly. The concepts are different, and when you're at the end of that journey and look back, you'll find that you spent a large amount of time unlearning things. That is if you ever get there. It's easy getting stuck on local maxima when avoiding steep learning curves.

In other words, old school PHP and modern PHP are two vastly different beasts with few commonalities.

There is no way past learning the basics (OOP, patterns, proper architecture), by deferring that in favour of an easier start you're only lengthening the journey.