woah.. you answered.. and fast.
I live in US, too. Haven't felt the downturn much either - lots of local businesses are using the slow down to upgrade their websites, and I own my own web development business, so they are keeping me busy.
Not sure if you have ever heard of it, but an open source eCommerce package called Magento is built using the ZF and has become very popular in the circles I travel. It's a great package for online stores, and got me deep into the bowels of ZF learning how to customize it. Thanks to doing work on Magento, I discovered that Wade Arnold had ported his AMFPHP over to ZF and improved on it as the Zend_Amf server module.
I also do flash design, and Zend_Amf has opened up a huge potential for new projects that implement flash and make great use of remoting. AMF is fast, efficient, and a great way to deliver content into flash or manage users, etc.
At the end of all that - well, I am developing at least one PBBG based on the ZF, AMF, Flash combination.
