> This, however, is going to be an unpopular opinion amongst the PHP crowd, but I can distill the rest of your comment into the following statement: "PHP is thriving because companies are cheap, don't care about quality as much as cost, and there is an over-abundant labor supply of poorly skilled, mainly self-taught PHP 'developers' who are willing to work for peanuts and get the job done to an adequate level." There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but trying to turn it on its head by implying developers skilled with, e.g. Ruby/Rails frameworks (see note below), are essentially overpaid and narrow-minded is just absurd.
That's an interesting reading of my comment. A less cynical reading might be that companies tend to:
1. Value cost-efficiency.
2. Understand that the constraints of time, cost and quality are all related and must be balanced based on business and project need.
3. Recognize that a smaller labor pool tends to increase cost and risk, sometimes unacceptably.
Most companies simply don't have the luxury of, without regard to cost and schedule, writing blank checks for development, demanding perfection (elegant code, the technologies du jour, premature optimization, etc.) and limiting their employee/contractor pool to rockstar engineers with CS degrees from top universities.