Am I right in saying you think it's bloated because it's superfluous? If that is the case, may I draw your attention to one of the most important reasons for do

Am I right in saying you think it's bloated because it's superfluous? If that is the case, may I draw your attention to one of the most important reasons for doing request handling within PHP: testability. Were it not for that I would be in complete agreement with you; I have absolutely no time for any framework that does not allow you to construct a mock request object, throw it into the controller, and verify correctness of the response object produced.