If I may, @mrclay. Certainly, PHP is doomed with naming inconsistencies, and what the Elgg team did so far with Elgg is leaning towards more consistency--it's actually one of the very few PHP projects that promotes proper engineering over hacking it together. If most PHP devs can live with (the) past (mistakes), good for them, but that's not a reason sufficient enough to promote stalling code and confusing APIs, as the bothering example you gave. Well-maintained, evolving, and consistent code wins every time. Hail deprecation warnings! :)