That's been my experience. From what I can tell the only time ORM tools actually make sense is when you have a lot of tables (or fewer tables with a lot of col

That's been my experience. From what I can tell the only time ORM tools actually make sense is when you have a lot of tables (or fewer tables with a lot of columns) and your interactions are very simple - i.e. you're mostly dealing with one table at a time. But this is pretty much an edge case. For simple applications I can write all the SQL in less time than it takes to configure Hibernate, and applications that require me to join seven tables in every query, use analytic functions, or share schemas with other applications, ORM tools don't handle the complexity very well.