Response to blog post found at http://www.phpbuilder.com/articles/tools/expression-engine-from-a-laravel-developers-perspective.html

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"It would be nice if, similar to Laravel's blade templating, a master template could be defined and 
have placeholder sections where other templates or code can be inserted."

- https://docs.expressionengine.com/latest/templates/layouts.html

"It's unfortunate there isn't a tool similar to composer/packagist that can be used to easily find 
and install open source third-party add-ons as easily as Laravel allows. Composer could probably be 
used to manage dependencies, but it's not something built in, and the number of packages for EE on 
packages is probably fairly low."

- Its true there is no built in package management, however, I've seen very few CMSs actually have 
this built in. Most of the time they need to be downloaded separately as zip files. Sounds like you 
didn't find devot-ee.com, which has over 1,000 add-ons listed.

"While writing modules for EE, I do feel like I am working to mostly adhere to the constraints of 
EE rather than building exactly what I desire."

- A well built add-on can do this. Write it agnostically and pass EE specific libraries as dependancies, 
just as you would any other application. It may require some EE specific code to work with the template 
parser, but its very possible to offload 90% of your add-on to non-EE libraries.

"A lot of setup is in the database, which isn't conducive to version control without some sort of migration/seeding mechanism."

- There are config overrides for nearly everything. (https://docs.expressionengine.com/latest/general/system_configuration_overrides.html) Its usually bad form to actually use the settings that are 
saved in the DB like the Channel settings. You don't need to define any paths there, just put the 
paths in your template with {url_title_path="group/template"} or use {site_url}my-channel/template. 
I haven't even gone to the Channel settings page to define anything in years.

"While EE does have its benefits, I think a better option is WordPress."

- For the love of all things holy, don't use that technical debt ridden, insecure pile of garbage 
codebase blogging system as a CMS. If you don't want to use EE again, try Craft or Statamic first instead of WP.