From a business perspective ( selling e-commerce platform to others) , yes don't reinvent the wheel. Magento is an e-commerce platform with three main target audience such as enterprise and many other child target audience like developers, it is nothing to compare to Laravel where laravel aims to make developers life easier ( it is Taylor passion, what an awesome dude :) ) help us right beautiful code.
From a developer perspective, I understand you end up re-inventing the wheel but think about this a little more before you switch, will you still be able to get child categories for a parent category like this:
$category->childCategories();
Or would you prefer the fully featured system that will force you to write the code like so
$category = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load(4);
$subcategories = $category->getChildrenCategories();
if (count($subcategories) > 0){
echo $category->getName();
foreach($subcategories as $subcategory){
echo $subcategory->getName();
}
}
More likely, the people who wish to own an e-commerce system will have thousands of records ( products ) to insert and they want to categorize them. Occasionally they will offer some discounts etc.. There is really two dozens of Models that construct an e-commerce application. Magento since its inception has been focused on only that, and it also involve third parties with the extensions system ( magento connect ). I am sure you have seen it already, but literally computer savvy customers will still not get "Why the magento product import tool is not working"
Edit:
Thinking about this a little more, I think a possible solution is to create Models in Laravel that interacts with the Magento Soap api. This way you remain leveraging the Magento features and the Laravel feature at the same time.
