That's probably because flashy websites distract you from the content. Most of the websites you listed are content heavy, and although some of them could use a facelift(ex:craigslist), their design doesn't overshadow the information that's displayed.
Sorry if it came off that way, I'll reword that part of the article as it seems to be misinterpreted. I understand that intellisense is a feature of an IDE, and not the language. I use netbeans with PHP, and it does have auto-complete. What I meant was that the code format used in C# was easier to use(maybe I am just used to it) than PHP's style.
I initially wrote the app in C#ASP.NET(2.0) but had trouble getting it to work well on the server with mono(problems with GDI), so I switched to PHP and used it as a learning experience. Perhaps I should have used a more general purpose language, but at the time I was unaware of the limitations of PHP.
What's so bad about PHP? I’d assume the goal in web development is the end product or service and not the means to it. It seems easy to miss the forest for trees, and delve into cult-like arguments of whatever software stack is hip.