[Revisor]

> Unfortunately, I inherited some Symfony applications recently. Unfortunately, because the whole stack is terribly slow and held together by an insane amount of YAML and XML configuration files. Add "annotations" (that are parsed out of doc blocks and compiled into another bunch of PHP files) to the soup and party like it's 1998.

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.