Codeigniter popularity : why ?

I am using CodeIgniter now for about 7 years. Over the years I have looked into other frameworks but none of them are so easy to learn as CodeIgniter. All my customer applications are using CodeIgniter as the server to a Javascript (ExtJS) frontend. The performance is great, but most of all it is very stable. What I like about CodeIgniter is that every new release (although they were not that many) has a very easy migration path (I migrated a complex application within one hour from version 2 to 3).

What I certainly have to mention is that most other frameworks have so much on board that I tend to think that sometimes less it better. It is a jungle of abbrevations and techniques where afer all I just want to have access to a database, do some logic and get something on a display through a browser. For that I don't want to learn 1000's of different things all the time. In this I am not a dedicated follower of fashion.

I believe that the CodeIgniter developers know that programmers have sometimes a large catalog of applications to maintain and the last thing that you would like is a hardheaded framework developer that thinks he is alone in this world through modifying structural behavior with release upgrades. So I think I will stick with CodeIgniter a little bit more.