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I think the future will be serverside JS
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I was considering this as well, given the advent of node.js and whatnot. I wonder what serverside development will look like in 10 years. I'm kind of excited about this because I do think JS is a rather beautiful language.

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But the fundamental failure with PHP, and not just a frilly issue, is that the PHP developers keep trying to make PHP into an object-orientated language.
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Interesting you should say that: one of the main reasons I think it's "messy" is because it seems like the OOP aspect was added to PHP almost as an afterthought. It seems very contrived, but in a lot of cases I'll find the OOP aspect useful, however, I do agree with you for the most part: I took a peek at the wordpress source once and it's one of those things you wish you could unsee. I don't know who would have the nerve to take the time to decipher that garbled mess of shit. I remember having to reference 3 or 4 different files to figure out what a single function did.

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If PHP embraced its procedural nature and fixed a lot of the niggles (array sort functions don't return the array) then it could be truly great.
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Yeah, I think it's things like this that bug me the most: the little things. The little inconsistencies like you mentioned there, but also other things. I think if I could change one thing in PHP, I would add the ability to select an array key directly from a function return. i.e. currently, instead of "$a = get_some_array()[3];", if I want a one-liner, I would have to do: "$a = array_shift(array_slice(get_some_array(), 3));".