IMO people discussing this topic really need to clarify what type of applications they are working on because the cost/benefit analysis changes quite significantly based on use case. If you're building a web-based reporting tool where you simply query records out of a database to dump to HTML and your objects are short lived, you might not get as much value out of an ORM compared to a client-side app where objects stick around for the entire lifetime of the application and you have to worry about things like object identity and staleness.