I wrote an ORM for Java, many years ago, and I have also come around to the anti-ORM position. One major reason for this was a conversation with a customer not

I wrote an ORM for Java, many years ago, and I have also come around to the anti-ORM position. One major reason for this was a conversation with a customer not interested in our product. She didn't want or need the extra layer, and also pointed out that writing Oracle applications were important on her resume. Writing applications through some unknown ORM added nothing to her resume. The position I've come around to is that a very light abstraction layer that does nothing other than set parameters to queries, and map result sets to objects. I still write the SQL, and put the queries in a separate file (e.g. in XML or a Java class containing the query strings as static final Strings). This is such a light layer that it isn't even a module or library. I just implement it as needed in each project.