This has been my experience as well. Being very comfortable with SQL, I initially thought very poorly of ORMs, especially given that my first major exposure was

This has been my experience as well. Being very comfortable with SQL, I initially thought very poorly of ORMs, especially given that my first major exposure was to a "buggy" half-hand-baked implementation. But, like a lot of other things, they definitely exist for a reason and can often be the best option given the particular tradeoffs you're given.