[BlackFly]

I agree completely, the features the parent is mentioning like "identity mapping, unit of work, and change tracking/events" are exactly the things I don't want out of the ORM because that is the leaky abstraction I don't want to constantly be working with and around.

If it was just a query builder we could have a conversation about the benefits of that vs sql and when one beats another. But it is all kinds of other features that are implicitly activated and then conspire to ruin your day when you were trying to solve some other problem. ORMs bring too much baggage by default. So now you have to talk about its relative merits compared to just writing SQL and the merits of always having these other features activated. Which other features? You need to read your full ORM manual because they really vary from one to another.

[nodamage]

Your comment comes across like saying "why would I use an impact driver when my screwdriver does everything I need?"

If you don't actually need those features then obviously an ORM will offer less value to you. That doesn't mean ORMs aren't useful tools, they just aren't useful for the problems you work on.

I tend to work on projects where those features are useful and if the ORM didn't provide them out of the box then I would need to build them myself. In other words using a query builder alone does not adequately solve the problems I need to solve.