You don't have to use Laravel. If you want more advanced stuff to be built in, go for it, but I can write reasonably complex apps with plain PHP. How simple is it? I showed a DBA with no programming experience (other than SQL) to make a change in an existing app in ~ 2 hours. The change was a new feature in the app, about ~ 100 loc. I also gave a complete non-technical colleague a small PHP application to own and support and it works quite fine 2 years later.
