Well yes that ... I think what we might think of as procedural style programming ends up being really handy for a lot of things (who knew! ). But modern languages are all OO so there are these ways to do procedural but take use of all the loading and packaging support for classes. PHP is doing a double U-turn in this regard.
Not sure I would agree 100%, although there certainly seems to be a trend in PHP to use statics as well as singletons. I think that is a result of more and more intermediate developers jumping on the PHP bandwagon.
Statics are interesting and I understand their appeal. In a single line, you gain access to an object *anywhere* in an application (Model-View-Controller-Templates-Scripts-Wherever). I also understand their dislike by others, especially those heavily involved in BDD. I prefer a mockist style of testing and therefore (more and more) I tend to lean towards dynamic programming techniques and thus move away from statics. I still have one singleton, the front controller, but that is it.
Long class names certainly make the use of statics far less appealing, so that is probably partially responsible for the push towards namespaces and possibly statics, IMO.
I see them as solving one problem for the price of two, but they are coming and there is not much that can be done about it I think. The hipsters love them for some reason. I have ask several times whether people actually like working with this new 5.3 style PHP code but have not got an answer yet.
I have nothing against namespaces, per se, I guess I just don't see the benefit out-weighing the biggest negative and that is hosts not supporting PHP 5.3 yet. If namespaces can be used similar to long class name prefixes and map to directory names, the switch for me is moot.
Certainly the use of closures. And stemming from that its concept of filters is an interesting solution to extensibility.
I often wonder if it is possible to utilize closures in PHP like jQuery did for javascript, a brilliantly simple solution to framework design perhaps?.

Can you offer any examples/insight in how closures are intelligently used in Lithium?
Cheers,
Alex