I haven't worked with Symfony, but I didn't get the idea back when I tried. I guess the Laracasts fast forwarded me into Laravels thinking and Taylor seems to care about every bit he write.

For the reasons now, Laravel is very fast for me to develop anything in and still feel I'm delivering quality. The goal of Laravel is to make the path from thought to product shorter, which makes good sense if you do it for living.

Yes that's a good one but it's funny that a guy (Otwell) took the basic ingredients of another framework, used it in a super-smart way and created sth better. For sure he offered to the world a powerhouse.

I have little experience with Symfony but i remember myself somewhat disappointed while trying to use it (with a Laravel 3 & 4 background already back then). Laravel definitely was the winner so i abandoned it and till now i have never looked back.

It is true Laravel sometimes makes you want to laugh with the simplicity it offers. We can prototype lightning fast. I can really build a RESTful API in a matter of minutes for my AngularJS Single Page Applications with middlewares included, repositories and interfaces for the interactions with the Database, events handlers and a bunch of super cool stuff. Controllers can stay ridiculously thin and yes under the hood that guy uses the basic ingredients of a competitor. How cool is that right?