There isn't a whole lot to dislike about the framework, honestly. If I am forced to say something is that sometimes the authors change the directory layout and it's not always easy to deal with. That being said, I've never not been able to upgrade within a few hours.
Sometimes using the artisan CLI - it requires additional tweaking to get it running on non-standard application rollouts.
Originally, it was a decision between Zend, CodeIgniter, and CakePHP for me. I chose CakePHP and used it as my main PHP framework for at least a couple of years before noticing and giving Laravel a fair try. Ultimately I selected Laravel because I felt it fit with my preferred development style, it utilized many of the modern best-practices I wanted to follow, and I felt that it allowed me to build better things in less time that seemed more maintainable. I have used, and still do use, Symfony directly for certain things, but I think of it (and use it) more as a code library than as a full application framework. When I'm building a web application, I tend to prefer Laravel.
