So sorry to hear about all the problems. Unfortunately I'm not a developer so cannot offer my assistance.

When is version 2.0 likely to be available?

Symfony2 is not as hard as it seems, just spend some quality time with the book for a couple of days and you'll be set.

Also, Twig (its templating engine; nothing of the likes of Smarty) and Assetic (script preprocessor & asset management) make Symfony very fun to work with.

Twig and Smarty 3 (not 2) are similar, both are templating engines using a Decorator design pattern. We're switching from CodeIgniter + Smarty to Symfony2 + Twig. Definitely a learning curve for Symfony, but oh-so-powerful when things finally start to click.