I too have been doing some work with meta-programming in PHP (specifically working on a typed language that cross-compiles). PHP isn't completely object oriented...even new functions for password stuff in 5.5 are added as stateless global functions w/ params. At this point, it's not worth it to change the language significantly...everyone knows the mistakes made and they just move on.

As for your project, it's neat. Runtime parsing and handling of docblock annotations can be a tad heavy and cumbersome. Some kind of pre-compiler might be nice. Also, toss your stuff on composer/packagist and you might find https://github.com/phpDocumentor/ReflectionDocBlock helpful too.

I disagree that we should just accept that PHP's old parts are a mess and never revisit them. The date functions were revisited when the DateTime type was introduced. Nothing prevents the introduction of String and Array types. The legacy string and array API's are a mess, and they affect productivity and code quality.

In the way you explain it, PHP isn't that different from C++. In C++ you can ignore all OO concepts and simply write C style procedural programs as well. No one mentions this when they discuss C++. I don't see why this "split personality" should be a problem with PHP. It's simply a language evolving, just like C did when C++ came around by keeping the old stuff around and adding new features.

I agree with you and I always wondered why the internals team hadn't done this themselves and just left the original functions as warty aliases for backwards compatibility.