One problem with both of those: PHP Also, I seriously tried to use Doctrine for a PHP project and though it seems great at first, I ended up going back to raw

One problem with both of those: PHP Also, I seriously tried to use Doctrine for a PHP project and though it seems great at first, I ended up going back to raw SQL. I have used Django and it's ORM, and I had no desire to do raw SQL. Symfony seems way over-engineered to me, and the horror of the PHP syntax really turns me off (though I'm quite familiar with PHP). If I'm going to use PHP, I'd rather just do what it is best at and get straight to the point.