On the Pro Developer site today there's a new post looking at the past and future of FuelPHP a framework started by Dan Horigan and Phil Sturgeon (who have both since left the team).

FuelPHP was first framework which used namespaces and was production ready at the same time. Small footprint, flexibility, namespaces, modularity and other gears make this framework great for building web applications. [...] For FuelPHP team 2012 was year with ups and downs. Dan Horigan was not available for his team members few months and no one didn’t know where he was. He show up on the twitter and then he was unreachable again. WanWizard (Harro Verton) and Jelmer Schreuder were most active at the building FuelPHP core and they done a great job.

He takes a look at the road ahead (FuelPHP v2) and the work that's already been done on it. He also notes that another of the core team members has left the FuelPHP development group a few days ago and that there were some things about the framework he no longer liked. The post suggests looking into something like Laravel (v4, not yet released) if you're shopping for a new framework. He does note that, while the future of FuelPHP may be rocky, it is a stable framework and is still a solid choice for a platform (especially if it's already in use).