[fapjacks]

Right, as if Python 3 is a hostile fork or something. Nope. The pushback against Python 3 boils right down to laziness on the part of library authors, and the 2.x people serve as a kind of echo chamber of conspiracy theory about what's simply an iteration.

[NeutronBoy]

That's kind of my point: If a non-hostile, non-forked, major version upgrade to an established language like Python encounters pushback from library maintainers and the community, what chance is there that a hostile fork to PHP will gather support from a critical mass of maintainers and community?

I honestly think a better way would be to write a library that acts as a wrapper/translation layer to the non-intuitive commands that exist in PHP (thinking about it, I'm sure one probably already exists).

[fapjacks]

Now I see your perspective, and I definitely agree with you, but I'm not sure the Python situation isn't a special case. For PHP though specifically, consider the changes that 5.4 brought. I think for all those changes, it went pretty smoothly bringing most PHP programmers to using those features without a lot of fuss. But you're in a much better position to say if anything I'm saying has merit.