Codeigniter or Laravel?

You are tripping. Cakephp is older than CI and is massively bloated and for years was just so slow. Quite a bit slower than rails even. Most projects made in cake get rewritten.

Now as for ci? Well, it has history and is by far the most simplest and powerful framework for the level of simplicity there is. It's very well thought out. You don't need what you did <?= $title ?> is fine. You don't need to escape something like that. As long as the data is escaped before you put it in the db its not even a huge deal.

As far as PHP goes, ci has been simple and pretty much the same API for almost 15 years now. Laravel has lots of goodies from rails, but what made ci great was it made for very concise and simple code. You can build a fairly large site in it, and be super surprised just how simple things are.

In rails which I love and use *daily*, I hope for that but its always one more gem, one more this, and things just get bigger and bigger.