Libraries, frameworks and tooling in PHP have evolved tremendously in the last couple years. If you look at the Symfony framework and its community you'll find a ton of brand new code that is state of the art, mostly inspired and building on top of ideas from other languages, most of the time improving on them too.
Node for example is lots of fun, but most of the libraries come complete with their bugs and lack of maturity. These are exciting things to work with, but not always best bang for the buck if you're aiming at being productive.
As for Ruby itself getting faster, well guess what PHP itself is getting faster all the time too [1]. You left it behind and it's still evolving without you. Shocker.
Node for example is lots of fun, but most of the libraries come complete with their bugs and lack of maturity. These are exciting things to work with, but not always best bang for the buck if you're aiming at being productive.
As for Ruby itself getting faster, well guess what PHP itself is getting faster all the time too [1]. You left it behind and it's still evolving without you. Shocker.
[1] http://www.php.net/archive/2012.php#id2012-03-01-1