I understand the reason for the php4/sales thing. However the structure of a symfony application is much more intuitive. The fully supported OO system allows for much more overriding. The plugins system is also much more advanced. If angie were setup closer to a system like that where the core functionality was a core plugin, anyone could override any of the core stuff without worrying as much about upgrades, their code can be developed outside the collab code tree. As it stands my modules are injected into the same place as core modules. On collab version upgrades I need to be careful, as it stands we were building an invoicing module, and when updated to 2.3 we had to rename it all because it was overritten by acollab. The ORMs used by symfony are also much more powerful. The ability to get hydrate objects/arrays with joined relations in a single query is great. I'm not sure how many queries a single page load is in active collab, but a stronger ORM would be awesome.
Don't get me wrong, I'm somewhat enjoying developing the modules for activecollab for our internal use. Its miles ahead of the previous CRM tool we used also in php. I've spent over ten years developing php apps, and symfony I have found to be a massive jump forward in terms of speed of development and flexibility. I've used it for the past 2.5 years now and when developing these modules have found a bunch to be lacking in terms of adnacned feature set as outline above.
