Oh, and one opinionated aspect of Laravel, which made it a no-go for me, was that you must use its template engine Blade. There is no other choice, other than maybe PHTML. And, even though I’ve never used Blade, I consider it to be inferior to Twig, which is Symfony’s template engine. Oh, but you don’t have to use Twig, if you don’t want to. Another interesting aspect is, if you want to use Blade outside of Laravel, you actually have to not only use the Blade component, but you also need Laravel’s View component and even a third party component as a bridge too, to get it to work externally. To me, those two reasons show unnecessary coupling (and an opinionated bit with Laravel).
Oh, and the documentation between the two are world’s apart too, for both the template engines and the frameworks. Symfony has probably the best documentation of any framework out there.
I really couldn’t find a way to drop Blade. But I found an article on Symfony templating, which shows how to make a bridge to get Smarty working with Symfony. Fairly easy, isn’t it? To me, this is the kind of “decoupling” you need for an enterprise ready application.
Scott