I would recommend Doctrine with Symfony. Eventhough there is more to learn you will find it has the features you will need once the project grows (CRUD, Form framework, Record Templates, DQL, Plugin support, Behaviours). Both projects have very active community and you shouldn't find yourself in a dead end, because most of your questions have been already answered in official tutorials or in a forum.
If you don't like database definitions in YAML, you can always use ORM Designer or MySQL Workbench.
