I wouldn't call it an abomination per se, but it is a very heavy ORM in my opinion. It works well for CRUD, but can be a dog in performance for very complex que

I wouldn't call it an abomination per se, but it is a very heavy ORM in my opinion. It works well for CRUD, but can be a dog in performance for very complex queries. (These type of queries can be offloaded into stored procs, of course... but inexperienced developers might "forge ahead" and create low-performance code in EF, unfortunately...) From my perspective, my biggest problem with EF is that Microsoft seemed to half-abandon any concept of "light weight data access layer" (like the previous Linq to SQL), and pushed Entity Framework as The One True Way to call the data layer. EF is definitely suitable for Microsoft's "core audience" of large, enterprise-y CRUD apps, but IMHO it's rather heavy for a simple web page with a few data calls. Fortunately there's things like Dapper that are great for small quick apps.