[tychobrahe]

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most of those complaints related mostly to the SQL generation rather than the "mapping" part?

I find that the problem when discussing ORMs is that we gave them two completely different responsibilities: generating queries and mapping the results... In fact, those two are already separated in Rails (AREL?).

I don't see much of a criticism to the mapping part (and the benefits given to you in form of validation/metadata/migration/schema versioning)... In fact, unless you're going to access the records directly via the database driver API (giving way to hideous coding), you'll probably reinvent the wheel or do the O-R mapping by hand to fill POCOs/POJOs/etc, as I've seen on so many enterprise projects (in different levels of elegance).

But then, again, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.