Definitely. But I have come to appreciate a sprinkle of magic, especially if you can say show how the magic transforms something into something else that happen

Definitely. But I have come to appreciate a sprinkle of magic, especially if you can say show how the magic transforms something into something else that happens to be more verbose. Hibernate went through this too. I came to prefer myBatis, but going through JPA is nicer. JPA is certainly not less magical than Hibernate though, just the culmination of many years of work in this area. SQL Alchemy is also nice like this. The magical ORM is built on an extremely robust and well-documented relational database querying library. There's an escape hatch to reality if the magic fails you, always. Can't say that about Hibernate 3—see the HQL/Criteria API madness (again, fixed in JPA). I went through a very hyper-annotation period with Java. I have since calmed down. I still make annotations, occasionally, but I don't let them be the only route to the work. Always have the annotations help something build a configuration through a standard API, then the work happens against that configuration. You can ditch the annotations if they're a pain that way, or bridge between something else (XML probably) without writing the same code twice.