Laravel is actually relatively simple, compared to Symfony "framework edition" where everything is compiled and cached into something else.You'd a dynamic langu

Laravel is actually relatively simple, compared to Symfony "framework edition" where everything is compiled and cached into something else.You'd a dynamic language wouldn't need YAML or XML files for configuration like Struts or Spring... But the truth is that PHP isn't declarative enough to make it unnecessary. In fact Java is more declarative than PHP. The other problem with anything built with Symfony components is that Symfony components never come with good defaults, they are a pain in the ass to instantiate manually, with huge object graphs because "decoupling". That's shouldn't be the case, one shouldn't have to create 15+ objects just to use a form factory for instance. Even Doctrine which is much more complicated than Symfony comes with acceptable defaults. Arrays/Maps of options passed as arguments of class constructors is a blatant demonstration that something is broken.