A lot of the over engineering in Laravel comes from Symphony, which in turn inspires how Laravel is built. And with the Proxy pattern in use everywhere, it inspires high coupling in your code in a way that doesn't quite look like coupling but is nonetheless.
I would argue that Symfony is well engineered, not over engineered. The fact that Laravel is already at version 5 demonstrates just how poorly engineered it was in the first place.
That's an odd argument. Is Rails poorly designed because it's had 4 versions, or Django because it's had 8? Seems much more to do with the pace of the development than the architectural quality, to me.
EDIT: It depends on what the versioning represents.
I don't think there have been as many breaking changes in Rails vs Laravel, and Rails at v4 has been over ... 9-10 years? Laravel is < 6 years old, with, from what it seems to be, rather significant philosophical changes between major versions. Doesn't mean it's bad, but perhaps closer to using gentoo vs centos.
