Primarily, all the new stuff I'm doing is a combination of ReactJS standalone apps that then access APIs written in python (flask). I've gotten pretty good at replicating the blockchain into my own indexes via mongodb/redis using python services which then feed into some pretty simple REST APIs.

SteemDB v1 right now is written all in PHP. I've done PHP since the 90's so it was a language I didn't have to think hard about, and while learning how Steem and it's blockchain worked, I didn't want to make things more complex than they had to be. At this point now though, I understand how they work rather well and have been slowly migrating them to better (Non-PHP) solutions and hope to do the same with SteemDB.