Even if it were true that "90% of the people bitching about PHP couldn't put two solid arguments together," not only is that irrelevant to PHP's merit or lack thereof, it leaves a whole lot of people with valid arguments.
Further, "the only thing "wrong" with PHP is that it's inelegant and inconsistent as language" is your opinion. It is most certainly inconsistent, yes. It also grows and changes in strange, illogical ways, has a history of horrendous built-in defaults and security practices (e.g. REGISTER_GLOBALS, which had a very long life and is likely still enabled on a whole heck of a lot of servers). There are many reasons to avoid PHP.
There are also reasons to avoid most other languages. I and many other people, however, believe that PHP is so far ahead on that list as to be a liability in and of itself.
You're making even more unsupported assumptions regarding what attracts people to Ruby, and I don't know whether this is false dichotomy or some other logical fallacy, but "you can write bad code in Y as well as X" says absolutely nothing about X.
In the end: Yes, if you're careful and skilled, you can probably write solid, secure code in PHP. However, there are more roadblocks to this pursuit in PHP than in any other language I've worked with (9 years of experience in PHP, 6 in Python, less in various other relevant languages).