Specific coding related problems like spaghetti code and smelly code are definitely valid, but I think more than that, these are the things that give me headache. Lack of clear requirements. Lack of ownership on code. Lack of tests. Purely in code, I don't like if-else chains, or worse, nested if-else chains. nested for/foreach methods that do too much methods/functions with a lot of parameters

Definitely! Drupal's future has never been stronger. It has a lot of things going for it - awesome community, strong business backing, modern PHP codebase, and did I mention community? But you may be asking if it will be as easy to learn considering you have to also learn a complex framework, and if that will be a factor with adoption. Many people had these concerns and we did see some people not being able to cope. However, more and more people now see the power that came with this. There was a learning curve and they crossed it. The good news is that there is a lot of help available to learn. Apart from Drupal documentation, there is the Drupal IRC and the Slack channel and people answer questions there all the time. Another benefit that comes with the Symfony framework is that now Drupal is much more involved in the larger PHP ecosystem. This means that there is an even stronger community behind Drupal than there was before. If you need help, not only you can ask from Drupalers but also from people working on Symfony. Another benefit is that a Symfony developer can get started with Drupal much more easily and vice-versa. This applies to not just Symfony but any PHP developer with knowledge to write modern PHP applications.

I am a PHP developer since over a decade now who has considered jumping ship several times now. I am glad I didn't. To clarify upfront, I am not against learning other languages, quite the contrary actually. But I am glad I didn't abandon PHP when most of the "bad things" said about PHP were true. Yes, PHP has flaws, maybe has more in its share than other programming languages. I wish PHP's function naming conventions were consistent (also its parameter conventions). I wish it was stricter with arrays. I wish it was stricter with comparisons. And a lot more. I won't undermine efforts required for someone to deal with these flaws but I dealt with them. I did that because I found a community and saw that a community was much more important than a language's (or framework's) technical features. My experience being involved in PHP community, specifically Drupal, has been - there is no other word for it - awesome. Actually, Drupal (code) was one of the reasons I didn't leave the PHP ecosystem but that is another story. I have written about my experience with Drupal and other technologies elsewhere (my blog) but it comes down to this: Like you said, you can write readable, testable, and fast code (in other words good code) with PHP. Design patterns apply to any language. You have to know enough about the language to decide how to implement a pattern there. Community is much more important than a language's features. By all means, use the best tool for the job (and that may not be PHP) but always look for a community behind the technology.