[danaris]

Functional and reliable, but often maligned by Real Car People for being boring and underwhelming.

Granted, the specific directions of the criticisms aren't quite the same, but there's definitely a decent analogy in there.

I don't know much about particular models, but perhaps a better make to pick as an apt analogy for PHP would be Hyundai: formerly a brand with fairly widespread reliability issues, that cleaned them up a lot more recently, and now a very solid pick.