Just out of curiosity, what problems did you run into specifically? I adopted CakePHP for similar reasons and haven't run into any issues that have made me regret it, although I did leave standard development practice for a few reasons that have made caching a bit more difficult than otherwise.
Sorry, I tend not to notice when people respond to my comments, it'd be great if this site had an easier way of letting you know when people do (maybe I'm just not aware of it?)
Anyway, the main issues I ran into were all related to database queries. This application was not a standard CRUD-style app at all, it has a lot of pretty complex queries for building reports. I found the way that CakePHP deals with joins and associations really clunky and hard to use compared to Rails' ActiveRecord. I'd often have to write the raw queries and try to shoehorn them into CakePHP's ORM objects.
I just found myself frequently frustrated with the way it was working. It's been too long since I really worked on it for me to be able to give much more detail than that (also, it probably has improved a lot since then too).
That said, using it as a web framework still made coding the app a heck of a lot easier than it would have been without it. Also, I found that it really improved my PHP skills, I picked up a ton of good stuff from using it.
