I too started out with CI, then when it seemed it was in limbo of who was going to support it, i jumped ship to Laravel 3.
I absolutely love Laravel. Built a great application on it in fact. The only thing now is Laravel is updating so fast it's hard to keep up with the changes. Just when i built my app on Laravel 3, 4 came out. When i finally upgraded to 4, 5 came out which was a big overhaul. Because of this they came out with 5.1 LTS(long term support), but to be honest the best parts of Laravel 3 & 4 that i liked seems to be going away with the latest 5.1 release(easy, lightweight, nice file structure, etc...) Don't get me wrong, it's still an impressive framework but seems to be getting a whole lot more confusing and bloated.
As for CI, I'm interested in taking another look at it because of all this. I enjoyed it when I was using it a lot back in the day. Glad to see it is not going anywhere. I can't really speak that much about CI 3 because CI2 was my last experience, but i'm definitely interested in coming back.
