After about 10-15 years working with many different systems that one way or another store their data in a RDBMS, all I can say is that I agree with what you wro

After about 10-15 years working with many different systems that one way or another store their data in a RDBMS, all I can say is that I agree with what you wrote. ORM-wed code is a nightmare, 3-5 years on. When the ORM trends have shifted to something else, and the original people who implemented it or selected the framework is long gone. Ill take a messy system with hand coded SQL over that any day, atleast then you have a chance to refactor. Also, its not that hard to implement a pluggable data access layer (that uses hand written SQL). The most important thing is to keep your RDBMS data model separate from your application model. These two will be intermingled when you are using a ORM, in my experience.