I agree with you that PHP's standard library is a piece of shit, but I agree with the parent's post that people create the problem. If you choose to implement the standard library in a messy fashion, it'll be a mess. I wrote PHP for a while (8 years maybe?) and the last few projects I started people were able to easily jump on board and start working immediately.

About a year ago I finally decided to build a VM server for development in my house. I'm amazed how easy it is to set up KVM now. I wrote a post on how to set up a headless KVM server on Ubuntu 11.10. I had originally done it using virsh on the command line but virt-manager over X has eliminated that part. It was easy to set up (maybe an hour) and I haven't had any issues. Shameless plug: I wrote a tutorial if anyone's interested.

As someone that's worked on a few decent sized projects (2-3 million pageviews / day), I can say that a normalized database is a complete nightmare to try to work with. It just doesn't scale. I'm not sure what constitutes a "huge" data warehouse, however, if you're running a SELECT with a where clause that triggers a table scan against more than a million rows, yeah, it'll take a while, no matter if you're selecting against an integer or a char field.