I primarily use EF, although I have used many others in the past. You are right that not all ORMs are equal, not even close. But with EF at least those proble

I primarily use EF, although I have used many others in the past. You are right that not all ORMs are equal, not even close. But with EF at least those problems aren't really a big deal. You are right that SQL is perfectly adequate - great actually. I generally think in terms of SQL before loading data with a Linq query. Often I'll do a query that projects to a model/dto. Or if I do need to load the entity and it's relations, I'll craft it just like I would in SQL. You can load the desired related entities first and then when you load the main entity they get auto populated since they are in the context. It's easy to build exactly what you need this way. So why use an ORM? Well for one, on commands if I load an entity I get change detection for free. I get bulk inserts/updates/deletes for free (Using ef extensions). I get strongly typed queries for free. I'm able to find all references to a particular table or column across my entire code base with a single click. I can build up queries dynamically via linq. There's a lot of huge benefits that save a lot of time.