The biggest deal for me is type safety (I use C#'s EntityFramework). While composing the ORM queries, I get the benefit of static verification, autocompletion,

The biggest deal for me is type safety (I use C#'s EntityFramework). While composing the ORM queries, I get the benefit of static verification, autocompletion, and can avoid the common boilerplate of joins. When reading code, find-references and so on work.