I came away thinking the same. Also, Laravel seems (from first glance at least) to lack the modular design approach of Symfony2 i.e. with Laravel you either take the whole framework or nothing at all - you can't selectively pick which modules you want. Another thing I missed was Silex's approach of using a minimal core and then relying on third party providers for functionality rather than re-inventing the wheel (e.g. Doctrine for db work, Monolog for logging and Twig for templating).