I don't recall how long it took me to avoid the potholes mentioned. Many of them I never discovered by myself for years. None of them I discovered in my first week of ever using the language.
I do not have a regular, daily or ongoing problem with *anything* in your post. Not string/number comparisons. Not Unicode support. Not integer sizes. None of it. That was *my* point. (Yes, I have code that handles Unicode between browser and database. With zero problems. In the PHP. All our Unicode problems are in Java, believe it or not!)
The bigger problem is not how un-orthogonal and inconsistent it is, but that so many programmers who will never *ever* be more than just barely mediocre are releasing code to the world at large. Which is the sole reason I Will Not Use PEAR: it is a big heap of shite. It's also the reason I dislike most PHP frameworks. The PHP "community" is just not self-policing.
OTOH, I'd love to have a PHP where a lot of that was repaired or discarded. I'm not really that much of a masochist! :-)
Wade.