There's a reason Yii1 is one of the most popular PHP frameworks. Yii2 brings that greatness up to modern day best-of-practice standards.
Designed to be fast, Yii makes the most of the latest PHP lazy loading techniques with minimal overhead.
You design the database, attach Yii and then run the Gii module to generate CRUD for your tables and modify at will.
Yii2 uses composer and namespacing making it trivial to include and use external libraries in your application.
Don't like Yii's code structure? Don't use it! As a composer package you are free to use Yii classes at will in any application.
By documenting my learning it helps me to understand what I'm doing, and in turn I hope that helps others trying to learn the same things.