In my many years I've seen four reasons that stand:

1) Maintainability between the database and the software models. Specially when starting a new project, the database model can change a lot and it can be pain.

2) Every project I've seen using SQL DAOs, end up writing some sort of ORM. You can see this when you find a class called "Select" in your persistence code.

3) Not every developer is a good SQL developer.

4) Your persistence/DAO layer has to keep up with other stuff which an ORM usually provides: connection management, transactions, caching, key restrictions, error handling. This is a critical bug waiting to happen scenario.

I'm also not a big fan of ORM's (and actually have been trying to stay away from them in new projects) but most of the times it is the best solution.