It's like one people saying "I don't want to use guns, because they are difficult to understand and I can do bad things with them."

Meanwhile, the people who are taking the time to learn about and use guns are dominating the world.

Any developer worth his salt will understand how to do SQL Statements to get back the right dataset or perform the correct updates. Harping on the benefits of an ORM is a bright red flag in my book, because none of them are better than the power, performance, and flexibility of actually understanding SQL. If you concentrate on learning the ORM, then you are learning yourself into a box and won't even know that there are great things outside it if you had only spent the time to learn SQL.