Pohopo, that's EXACTLY how I feel about CFM.
CFM is more like a limited tool kit that can do all the simple stuff but as soon as you try to get "out of the box" it punishes you.
PHP is like a ar of cold rolled steal and a bunch of machine making tools. You might spend half to day building a tool, but after that, you've got the exact tool you want. And nowadays, there's lots of pre-made tools.
I had a similar experience as mentioned higher up in the thread performance wise running a CF server. We set up a simple page that just hit the db and returned a couple rows in some simply formatted page. PHP/Apache/Postgresql could run it at about 700 reader threads, with http auth turned on, it dropped to about 150 threads. The page was taking something like 250 milliseconds to load. With CF the CF server would die and not come back at around a dozen or so threads, and it was taking several seconds per page view at that level.
It simply doesn't scale well.
I had a buddy that worked at a shop that made an ecommerce site with CF, that had 4 servers. They had to put a squid type proxy in front of it, and have a script visit every page of the site through that proxy when they restarted the servers, with the site OFF the internet, or it would simply crash under load. And they only had somehting like 1,000 products on line.
He was so proud of all the work he'd done and his ingenious solution for handling load. I was embarrassed for him for having to do it.