[Capt-RogerOver]

I think your experience reflects that basic gist I've gotten from most professionals: ORMs are complicated and convoluted because they provide a solution for a very complicated problem. If you are somewhat new and don't understand things, it's easy for you to see the few problems introduced by ORMs and think that it means that the whole concept is just unnecessary bloat. With more experience and wisdom, you understand that the few quirks of ORMs are a necessary evil for having a software that solves such a complex and flexible task.

[klodolph]

That's a good analysis of things, and on top of that, when you're new you'll treat an ORM like a hammer in search of a nail. So someone who's less experienced and doesn't realize that you should supplement the ORM with raw SQL queries might try to evaluate complicated queries in the ORM, with the usual results. Some of that has changed with e.g. LINQ and IQueryable in .NET, but it's no panacea.