Any discussion on ORMs needs to consider what sort of app and queries you are writing.

ORMs are fantastic for the very common case:

* Fetch 20 rows and display them as a table,

* Fetch 1 row by primary key and display it as a form,

* Write updated fields from the form back into the 1 row in the database.

Anything more complicated, and direct SQL starts being more attractive. But for the common case that ORMs are designed for, they are a major productivity boost.