I stopped using CodeIgniter years ago (back in the v2 days) in favour of Laravel and have never looked back. These days with v4 CodeIgniter can more easily take advantage of the plethora of libraries available as Composer packages - you could do it with v2 but it was nowhere near as easy.

For a lot of the reasons you've mentioned and more, though, Laravel is still my primary choice at the moment. Its popularity in the industry makes it the one to beat, but it's also crazy to ignore it.