Ah I remember it like it was yesterday. After years of doing work in the Java and Scala ecosphere I took a gig at a mortgage company doing PHP. Composer, Larval, Symphony2, Silex and a dozen other things made it seem to me like PHP might not be too bad. I might even have some fun!
Then the day I started I learned the sad truth. The "Technical Architect" laid down the law: all applications had to be written in Zend Framework 2 and nothing else. I gave it a chance, read all the docs and wrote an app in it. Suffice to say there was a scarce community and lots of defects. I also found how it worked overly complex. Imagine taking spring and asking "how can I make this harder and in PHP?" That's how I found the dependency injection framework to be.
Suffice to say I only lasted 3 months before moving on. ;-)
This sounds like one of those Whisper fake stories or a r/thathappened post, especially with the "suffice to say" and the smiley at the end.
I used ZF2 during the beta, and the activity on SO, their IRC and their forums were high even then, so I can't say I recognize what you say about the scarce community.
I also used ZF2 for a project (shortly after release) and I agree with your assessment of the community: there was clearly a lot of interest and contributions.
That being said, I also agree with carrja99's comments regarding the complexity and defects. Many things felt unfinished, and documentation was pretty poor if you wanted to step outside the boundaries of what was covered in their example applications (which was unfortunately necessary for my project). I ended up reading a great deal of framework code for that project.
I'm not doing PHP at the moment, but I don't think I'd even consider ZF3 at this point given how many other strong frameworks are available.
Then the day I started I learned the sad truth. The "Technical Architect" laid down the law: all applications had to be written in Zend Framework 2 and nothing else. I gave it a chance, read all the docs and wrote an app in it. Suffice to say there was a scarce community and lots of defects. I also found how it worked overly complex. Imagine taking spring and asking "how can I make this harder and in PHP?" That's how I found the dependency injection framework to be.
Suffice to say I only lasted 3 months before moving on. ;-)