Hi,
long story short, 2.0 will solve your issue.
2.0 would implement zephir lang and it would certainly bridge that gap for you. Right now it is still in development, and i believe we might be pushing stable soon. (not entirely sure how soon though).
As far as usability is concern, 2.0 is workable right now.
Zephir lang has syntax similar to php, and it has a compiler that compiles into native c, with all the goodness of optimization. So i would say until PHP7 comes out, which is a year or two from now, phalcon will continue to be a player in php/c framework.
In fact i might say with some of the changes made in zend engine itself, phalcon might be able to take advantage of it using zephir lang.
https://zephir-lang.com/
https://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon/tree/2.0.0/