No, programming is great for that because it's one of the specialities that's easiest to learn in your spare time.

It's hard to compare, they are both very good. Pick the one that suits you best. Do you like the magic that Laravel provides you? Or do you like the transparency of Symfony more? Do you like ActiveRecord? ... One thing that I did notice is that big corporate clients often feel more comfortable with Symfony.

I would love to be able to work for my own. Working at an agency is ok and I don't hate it here but I have a desire to "create" and iterate on my own thing.

Twitter had a really awesome API in it's first couple of years but they really locked it down too much. Also I feel like the documentation used to be more transparent. For example: simple retrieval of who liked your post has been removed and moved up to the enterprise plans.

Although this is really funny it should only be used as a last resort IMO. Doing these kind of semi-blackmailing practices can further harm the relationship with your client and it's probably not even legal in most countries.