I broke through that barrier by just building my own framework. By the time I stopped, it was still grossly under featured compared to real FW's, but I figured

I broke through that barrier by just building my own framework. By the time I stopped, it was still grossly under featured compared to real FW's, but I figured out how to write an MVC framework with some of the niceties like URL routing, helper functions, validation harnesses, etc. The other part was building a websocket server in PHP, because the concept of something depending on Guzzle and parts of Symfony2 just struck me an insane for something like a standalone daemon. Those two projects dumped me face first into the internals of a framework, and then into the nastiness of protocol implementation (hybi-17) in PHP. After that came PHP daemons for the AWS SDK, learning how to make shared memory segments work with different processes, etc. Once the floodgates are open, there is no stopping.