All of them are bad in their own ways. They all fall down in key features, or the non-standard SQL features (hooks, after-save, automatic transactions, etc) all

All of them are bad in their own ways. They all fall down in key features, or the non-standard SQL features (hooks, after-save, automatic transactions, etc) all have edge-cases and surprising behaviour. I have tried a lot and the least worst is Zapatos (and it's not really an ORM) because it at least tries to not paper over SQL and instead just creates a type-safe API for using SQL.