I read php-internals every day, and.. this is totally understandable. There's a lot of opinionated people on that list with totally different visions - nikic, stas, that one guy Lester who is convinced 5.3 and E_STRICT was the worst thing in the world... PHP just appeals to too many people to have a consensus. Possibly the point this was made most clear was when the property accessors RFC was declined on a hairpin vote despite having a majority (and the time that switching to an actual AST-based parser was a non-starter).
Your contributions and voice will be missed.