Sounds like a perfectly normal professional stack to me: solid tried and proven technology at the foundation for the generic solutions, more hot new stuff around the edges to optimize for specific cases (and let's face it, sometimes just for the hell of it).
It's only the inexperienced unprofessional wannabees that bitch about anything that doesn't use all the cool new toys top to bottom, and try to solve every problem using the coolest tool instead of the most appropriate.
And the only thing "wrong" with PHP is that it's inelegant and inconsistent as language. 90% of the people bitching about PHP couldn't put two solid arguments together.
The argument that it attracts the worst programmers is no longer true since Ruby's "coolness" started attracting large numbers of less than mediocre programmers, proving publicly on Github that you can write crappy code in even the most elegant of languages.
Even if it were true that "90% of the people bitching about PHP couldn't put two solid arguments together," not only is that irrelevant to PHP's merit or lack thereof, it leaves a whole lot of people with valid arguments.
Further, "the only thing "wrong" with PHP is that it's inelegant and inconsistent as language" is your opinion. It is most certainly inconsistent, yes. It also grows and changes in strange, illogical ways, has a history of horrendous built-in defaults and security practices (e.g. REGISTER_GLOBALS, which had a very long life and is likely still enabled on a whole heck of a lot of servers). There are many reasons to avoid PHP.
There are also reasons to avoid most other languages. I and many other people, however, believe that PHP is so far ahead on that list as to be a liability in and of itself.
You're making even more unsupported assumptions regarding what attracts people to Ruby, and I don't know whether this is false dichotomy or some other logical fallacy, but "you can write bad code in Y as well as X" says absolutely nothing about X.
In the end: Yes, if you're careful and skilled, you can probably write solid, secure code in PHP. However, there are more roadblocks to this pursuit in PHP than in any other language I've worked with (9 years of experience in PHP, 6 in Python, less in various other relevant languages).
While there's nothing wrong with PHP per se, it's not like Python/Django or Ruby/Rails is any less 'tried and proven' tech than PHP/Symphony. I would only through stuff like Node.js into the 'hot new stuff' category.
It's only the inexperienced unprofessional wannabees that bitch about anything that doesn't use all the cool new toys top to bottom, and try to solve every problem using the coolest tool instead of the most appropriate.
And the only thing "wrong" with PHP is that it's inelegant and inconsistent as language. 90% of the people bitching about PHP couldn't put two solid arguments together.
The argument that it attracts the worst programmers is no longer true since Ruby's "coolness" started attracting large numbers of less than mediocre programmers, proving publicly on Github that you can write crappy code in even the most elegant of languages.