and many shared hosting providers are still on 5.2, and many crappy old scripts require register_globals on.

And that's PHP's fault? It won't affect you if you start writing a PHP 5.3 (or even 5.4) app today.

Yes, it is PHP's fault. It's endemic to the general attitude of the PHP team.

"Now just marginally less braindead than every other language" isn't exactly a selling point.

Sure, it used to be worse, but I see zero commitment from PHP to actually make real steps to fixing the situation. A real first step would be to start working on a 6.x release that actually removes the gazillion deprecated-but-still-present-and-thus-used things in the language.