In some ways, I agree with you. SQL is part of the problem. But, correctly structuring data is generally very hard, time consuming, has diminishing returns, a

In some ways, I agree with you. SQL is part of the problem. But, correctly structuring data is generally very hard, time consuming, has diminishing returns, and adds maintenance issues that never go away. I've seen teams spend months up front trying to craft a perfect schema, only to see it demolished when a non-obvious edge case appears. I've also seen teams become over burdened with schema and data maintenance, that it takes up 20-30% of their time. That's not to say that you're not right, but sometimes ORMs are just the more pragmatic answer to get a team through the first 4-5 iterations (or even longer). And, sometimes path-independence is important. But, often, the database just ends up being coupled with the application anyway. At least that's my experience.