bastion

From this I would say you prefer a more "traditional" approach and that's OK (K.I.S.S is good). It's also why CodeIgniter is a great learner's framework. Personally I find CodeIgniter cumbersome to use over time, having to perform a lot of low level programming. So I guess it is a matter of taste. Of course if you have a bias against ORM then CodeIgniter is the obvious choice; CodeIgniter's Active Record class is like a very basic ORM without any of the complex moving parts (no relation definitions, etc). After using both extensively, I think Laravel offers more leverage with a similar API. I agree with you about the routing, in fact, the administrator tool I am working on now uses a routing system similar to CodeIgniter sitting on top a Laravel route. Again this is because I prefer the traditional approach in this usage case, less flexible yet more predictable. So it could be a matter of taste and contingent on the application requirements.

I recommend Laravel 4 as being like the 2nd generation CodeIgniter, it is simple yet powerful. At the end of the day, use what you are most comfortable with. A framework or language is only as good as the programmer using it.

You don't echo the response, you return it -- this is correct. The 'suth' filter could be stopping this route from executing, without seeing that everything else looks fine.

OctoberCMS is a laravel cms currently in the works, worth checking out (when it's ready!)