You're absolutely right. In fact, our application has a pretty severely hierarchical nature. Initially, we just pulled out the top-level things and let Hibernat

You're absolutely right. In fact, our application has a pretty severely hierarchical nature. Initially, we just pulled out the top-level things and let Hibernate handle it, but performance was ghastly. We added a native query to pull out the first four levels at once, and a great deal of manual code in Java to process what came out. This is good, but the fifth level is self-referencing and recursive. I have an SQL query now that can retrieve everything at once, but the amount of Java code I'm going to have to write to drop it in is a significant barrier. Still, once I do, most of our egregious performance problems will be solved. You can make it work. But I think Hibernate and other ORMs work by selling you on the notion that they're an abstraction, that you don't have to know everything to use them. In my experience, Hibernate winds up creating a third domain of necessary expertise, rather than managing the two so you only have to have one. And this is the source of the anger.