Keeping eye on competing frameworks

Not surprised they were surprised. I've been working on CI exclusively for last 10-11 years maybe. Because my current job it's one massive application running everything, and I'm the only dev here, it was very hard to even consider moving to anything else, but I have noticed that CI has dropped off from job ads. They request MVC experience, or Laravel explicitly.

I think going head to head with Laravel, trying to attract exact same market would be costly.

To me CI sounds like a tool for bigger apps that need loads of custom code and need to be fast processing requests, without all the nice to have clutter that other frameworks need to process. If someone can benchmark it and prove it beats Laravel or Symphony with raw power, that would be good selling point for "enterprise level" projects.

Said that, I have to say I do like the look of some developer specific tools that come out of the box for Laravel, that would make it easier to debug, monitor, etc, so there could be some room there for either official additional libraries or someone else to build free or premium products ontop of core CI4 that are specifically developer facing.