I would agree with hackermom.  Of course, there are tools that may adhere to some standard better than others, but who is to say that adhering to a particular standard is the right move every time? And to what degree should a tool adhere to said standard before it becomes magically "good"?<p>Without context of the given problem at hand, the timeframe to complete the project, and the skillset of those involved, it's naive to make a blanket statement saying there are just plain bad tools.<p>In my humble opinion, tools should enable you to get your job done faster and at a higher quality than had you not used the tools.  The more skilled a programmer is, the more variation there is in leveraging a tool for the end goal.  This goes for any framework and any language.<p>Seems like people are forgetting that there are a lot of very handy functions built into PHP5 that make life simple for the web developer.  Yes, some args are inconsistently ordered, and naming conventions are not the most consistent.  Still, the fact of the matter that there are several high-quality frameworks available for PHP5 that are as strict or loose as you like speaks to me that PHP--like Ruby or Python or Perl--is a platform that at allows people to get things done.  Isn't that the point, after all?