[chipotle_coyote]

While this is merely anecdotal, I feel compelled to note that I'm a PHP programmer -- as well as a Python and a Ruby programmer (in the sense of "somebody has paid me going market rates for working in these languages) -- and even for PHP work, I am not cheap. And, while I am of course a biased observer, I'd say I'm not low-skilled, either.

I generally agree with your technical criticisms of the language (I generated a bit of heat and light a few months ago with a blog post called "PHP is not an acceptable COBOL"), but I don't think your assertions about the economics are entirely correct. I don't think most companies choose PHP because they expect it will let them get cheap help -- I don't think most companies actually choose PHP. They end up with PHP for any number of reasons that don't have anything to do with long-term planning. (Also, if you were putting together a database-backed web site in the early 2000s, there's a very good chance you'd go with either ASP or PHP unless you had a lot of experience in web programming in another language. After you built up sufficient inertia, switching would be difficult.)

On the flip side, there are a lot of companies out here in Silicon Valley using Ruby on Rails because it fits very, very well into the niche you describe: take a bunch of Rails gems and learn just enough Ruby to hold it all together with spit and duct tape. If I were starting a company and wanting to hit the "low-skilled, cheap niche," the only downside to choosing Rails is that low-skilled Rails programmers frequently don't recognize that they're low-skilled, because the mere fact that they've chosen Rails makes them think they're definitionally awesome.

(N.B.: I like Rails a lot, but gosh, it's attitudinal.)