Not the answer you are looking for, but I've heard so much about Laravel that I've finally started to dive in. I do wish there were more L5 tutorials around, however.
Coming from a background where I did more or less everything myself from scratch, learning the ways of a framework isn't the easiest thing I've done in a while.
Back on to your topic, what you need to remember is that proponents of a new piece of software will always criticise its rivals. You also need to remember that a lot of people will just learn a single technology, never try the others, but declare the one they are using is the best. I see it a lot at work, people will say X language is far superior to Y language, and if they need to argue why they'll Google until they find something that agrees with what they're saying. This comic sums it up: http://i.imgur.com/ROS7lGT.jpg
Laravel is best learned from the documentation. Laravel 5 changed a lot, but most things from Laravel 4 still apply; I'd recommend looking at Dayle Rees' Code Bright along with the official docs http://daylerees.com/codebright
You're right about the criticism though, it's hard to find any quality comparison on the internet, that's why I've posted here, in hopes of finding a lesser biased comparison, especially from those who've changed their go-to framework (e.g. from Laravel to Rails, from Express to Django etc.)
Did you watch all the intro to L5 videos [1] on laracasts? I also recently started using laravel and found those videos to be a huge help. Also the community on there and laravel.io/forums is really helpful.
Coming from a background where I did more or less everything myself from scratch, learning the ways of a framework isn't the easiest thing I've done in a while.
Back on to your topic, what you need to remember is that proponents of a new piece of software will always criticise its rivals. You also need to remember that a lot of people will just learn a single technology, never try the others, but declare the one they are using is the best. I see it a lot at work, people will say X language is far superior to Y language, and if they need to argue why they'll Google until they find something that agrees with what they're saying. This comic sums it up: http://i.imgur.com/ROS7lGT.jpg