Here's the disgusting part. I'm far more fluent in PHP than your average PHP developer. Where I work we face real problems of scale and use PHP effectively. A

Here's the disgusting part. I'm far more fluent in PHP than your average PHP developer. Where I work we face real problems of scale and use PHP effectively. And even with all this, after years of developing in PHP (among other languages), I happen to just stumble across random functions. In a structured library (like, say, .Net) I'd know to look in a specific place for a certain type of functionality, and if it's supported it's going to be there. There is absolutely no benefit to a large corpus of functions being included in the language core like that. All of your arguments--about officially sanctioned solutions with known quality control--would be satisfied just as well by an official, structured library shipped alongside, but not inside, the language core.