Exactly. It is amazing how many bad ORMs that I've seen in systems from people who "just used SQL" instead of an ORM. I've found that the people who know SQL p

Exactly. It is amazing how many bad ORMs that I've seen in systems from people who "just used SQL" instead of an ORM. I've found that the people who know SQL pretty well can actually do good work with or without an ORM. But the maintenance is a lot easier when the abstractions are consistent with the abstractions that are used by a popular ORM.