Fair enough, it founds like you found a good fit for your use case (and that's a good thing). In a year or two when you have a bit of time it might be worth go

Fair enough, it founds like you found a good fit for your use case (and that's a good thing). In a year or two when you have a bit of time it might be worth going back and having a look at Symfony anyway, you'll likely find that going from Laravel to Symfony will make more sense than CI to Symfony (underneath Laravel uses a fair few symfony things).