I've used many ORMs. I don't hate them, but I think their net utility is negative.

While you initially might think that interfacing with the db is going to be very tedious and labor intensive, it usually turns out to not be that bad.

Battling the ORM to make it do what you want can on the other hand be very tedious.

When you have the SQL in the code it's much more obvious what the performance profile and potential concurrency problems are. That's very important to solve real problems which arise in almost all projects with some scale.

If I were to choose my tools, I would pick some sql-based schema versioning system, and potentially a simple data mapper for moving data back and forth between db records and entities.

But I would be very reluctant to use a full-blown ORM nowadays.