I agree that the early versions of EF were very buggy (v1-3). It would work fine and then you would hit a show-stopping bug with no fix. However, the recent releases of EF have solved those problems and works great. I can't imagine not using an ORM at this point, and after witnessing NHibernate's stagnation I would recommend using something officially supported by Microsoft.

I hate it with a passion. I use Dapper whenever I can and couldn't be happier about it.

Yep. Dapper is far simpler. All the relationship navigation and deferred loading of related entities is clever but takes effort to optimize and is too easily abused.

Every large team I've seen use it (EF) ends up with slow horrible queries generated that DBAs see hitting the database thinking WTF?

Like a lot of Microsoft's data access technologies, it demos well in front of an audience. :-/ (from someone who still has their ODBC 5-1/4" floppies)