> It didn't hit me until near the end that I had reinvented Hibernate without all of the rest of its features.

This is pretty much the life cycle of the “ORMs suck” crowd. The hangups are similar to “XML sucks” — conflating a poor ORM framework or XML-based format with the concept of ORMs or XML in general.

ORMs are a very useful abstraction, and even if you think you aren’t using an ORM, you probably are — just a bespoke one.