Admittedly, I used it a long time ago. Back then, it was obviously never really used by any of its developers for things beyond the trivial "Blog Tutorial". For example, you couldn't reasonably put model-related code in your model classes, because the model data (coming in from the ORM as nested associative arrays) were structured subtly different depending on how it came in (i.e. on which ModelPeer the query originated). This effectively forced you to make fat controllers and useless models.

Additionally, I know of no framework that reinvented more wheels than CakePHP.