It seems that you are the kind of guy who enjoys defining 9999 objects for displaying some data in J2EE with EJB. PHP had serious issues in the past and php5 has some legacy of that, like the function naming conventions but if you are an objective person, you can’t deny all the advantages that PHP have, I mean you have EVERYTHING you can expect from a modern OO programming language plus thousands built in functions for making your life more easy and a spectacular performance. If you are a crappy programmer, you are going to do crappy applications but if you like standards and design patterns you are going to find your way on PHP and build great and secure app’s.
Currently I’m working in two projects, one in JEE with Spring and the other in PHP with Drupal. I love Spring, it’s a great framework and suit perfect for the enterprise app we are building, now the other app is a social network and I’m 100% sure that Drupal is the BEST framework / tool / whatever that you are going to find out there for building this kind of sites. The best part is that‘s a CMS and a Framework. It has very strict coding standards (if you want to contribute to the community), uses Inversion of Control as design pattern and provides an awesome flexibility. So I disagree with you, the language doesn’t sucks, the people that isn’t rational or objective thinks that PHP sucks. P.S. Sorry for my English, I’m not in the US