Any time there are multiple possible explanations, Occam's razor comes into play.

Just a thought, but could this have been stolen from an air base in Iraq / Afghanistan? It would explain the lack of damage.

Drupal is my favorite PHP framework. It is has a very developer-oriented community and supports many great and powerful features right out of the box. It also doesn't force you to reinvent the wheel (form validation, success and error messages, http response code handling, logging, and so on). It is "opinionated" and I like it that way.

I dislike Zend for many reasons, but most importantly it's very difficult to discern what the "right" way to do anything is, and choosing poorly will typically bite you in the ass later. For example, not using the Zend menu system will cause trouble when you want to make a breadcrumb or do translation. Random internet blogs may get you to *some* solution, but usually not the correct one. The Zend form system is extremely convoluted compared to Drupal.

A caveat: there is definitely a learning curve to Drupal. Less so than Zend in my opinion, but you will definitely have many new things to learn before you will be efficient. Unlike with Zend, the correct way to do most tasks is well-documented in Drupal and has examples.

Not just that you know how to look things up, but that you know something exists so you can look it up. For example, regular expressions. Or hash functions. Or the many, many tree structures.

The "with a bit of effort" portion is key, and from what I've seen more people will not go back and fill in the gaps in their skills (or at least well). Industry experience is also very valuable, but will rarely cover the same ground as someone with a formal education and a couple years experience.

In my experience, the culture shock for new grads wears off in about 6 months to a year. Either they get with the program and start doing the work real-world right or they find a way to disappear into a giant corporate environment. Those that get with the program quickly become more valuable than self-taught programmers who don't understand the fundamentals well.

You eliminate a lot of possibility of gaming the system by making the tests standardized, graded by a machine, and having basic cheat avoidance like multiple versions of a test. But yes there is certainly a way to do this very badly.

The iPhone uses something special for YouTube. Still, I would expect full Flash support for the iPhone Safari browser before Linux, because Apple can definitely lean on Adobe if they feel a need for it.