I've always been frustrated that active record ORMs have completely overtaken tools like Linq2Sql. I don't deny the value of the active record pattern where it

I've always been frustrated that active record ORMs have completely overtaken tools like Linq2Sql. I don't deny the value of the active record pattern where it works, but in almost every case I've used SQL over the past 5 years, I don't want a complex abstraction layer. I just want something to make it easy and safe to talk to the database for the 90% of straight forward queries we write. With something like that, I feel as though I'd rather write my own active record system than use the configuration based systems we see with EF