I've had to put up several services throughout the years that performed exactly one or two queries, and a few more that performed less than five. It was a matt

I've had to put up several services throughout the years that performed exactly one or two queries, and a few more that performed less than five. It was a matter of setting up the database, writing a prepared statement, and calling that prepared statement with the relevant arguments. Bringing in an ORM for these cases is absolutely overkill. As your requirements constantly balloon, perhaps adding an ORM (or just a simple query builder) is appropriate. But none of the services I mentioned above have grown in that manner, and most are still up and have been running (and modified) for several years now. I've been on projects where an ORM and/or query builder was likely the right answer, especially for automated migration and rollback scripts. But the way you're presenting it seems to be all or nothing, and I couldn't disagree more.