Gopal Vijayaraghavan has posted some opinions about the way that several of the popular PHP frameworks work internally, more specifically in their inclusion schemes.

In the development of things, there comes a point when it escapes the vision and control of one man/one mind. PHP frameworks are such ... beasts. But the simplicity a machine took away can be made to return. And such an attempt at zooming out of the complex file structure bureaucracy of most php projects was inclued.

He points to this image of the Zend Framework's structure as an example of the unneeded complexity several of the frameworks are guilty of (including CakePHP, Symfony and CodeIgniter).

He also includes a suggestion that could help keep the frameworks a bit more accountable:

Now, all that remains is a php-graphviz + svg mode which renders these in-browser as an iframe - or maybe someone can help me with the graph reduction to take a collection of the inclued dumps & create a "package".