[kemo]

Yes, PHP can suck in many ways. Yes, everything else seems to be more elegant. And yes, newbies don't care. They just want it to work, no matter how. They don't care about creating servers (node) or including something they know nothing about (sinatra). Heck, they might do it with PHP as well, if they knew how to (Kohana?). But they don't and they never will.

On the other side, put good developers on a PHP project and you will get a good product, regardless of the haystack position and possibility to suppress errors (etc. etc. etc.). The fact that there is so much spaghetti PHP out there doesn't make it impossible to write good code with it. And that matters a lot.