Your ORM Sucks

"I don’t like frameworks. Web application frameworks, ORMs, whatever."

You are not the first to think this, and you are right about being able to have less bloat and understand what is going on and have more control if you do it in SQL and avoid unnecessary VOs, too many queries, etc. But, you are wrong. The fact is that you probably will at some point benefit more from understanding the ORM and framework and you will be able to write code faster. If the bloat is acceptable to the user, and it gives you more time to do other stuff, then just use it.