Every time I found something I liked about Laravel, it turned out to be a Symfony component. Every time I found something I hated, there was a Symfony component that did it better.
The best example has to be the templating languages used. Blade is a weird port of ASP.NET MVC's Razor syntax and I've never understood why anyone would use it over Twig (or even just raw PHP).
Whenever I do use Laravel the first thing I do is swap out blade for twig. I'm pretty sure no one would use blade if Laravel hadn't decided on it.
It's weird that a framework so self-consciously dedicated to 'best practices' would ignore what's considered one of, if not the, best templating systems in PHP. Particularly given the extra benefits twig provides out of the box (automatic escaping, a function sandbox, hooks for writing your own plugins and parsers, etc.)
The best example has to be the templating languages used. Blade is a weird port of ASP.NET MVC's Razor syntax and I've never understood why anyone would use it over Twig (or even just raw PHP).