Completely agree - looking back at some of the code I wrote in PHP3 there were huge issues with the language but it was more that I had no idea what I was doing than an inherent problem in the language (granted, PHP5 is lightyears ahead of PHP3 and I'm certain that the improvements have made writing good code easier). Today, it has all the tools that if you learn better general coding practices (like MVC or at the very least separation of presentation from logic) it doesn't get in the way and you can just do what you want. I actually think the $$ syntax can be useful, but like anything it matters how you are using it.
I remember when "structured programming" was the new silver bullet all the guru's were talking about. This must have been the late 70's or early 80's. I was programming in DEC Basic-Plus on the RSTS/E operating system on a PDP-11. All variables were global, as I recall. We had subroutines and user defined functions with arguments but no local variable scope. We had if-then-else, but I think only a single statement was allowed for the "then" branch, so the cleanest way was often "if condition then gosub 1000 else gosub 2000" or something like that. A lot of the legacy code I had to work with was classic spaghetti-code with goto for flow control. Oh, I think we had only single-character variable names. Those were the days.
But I worked out how to adopt the new structured style to the limitations of the language, and learned a lot. Better languages make better tools, of course, but it's the hacker's attitude that really matters.
