While I prefer vanilla SQL to the current generation of ORMs, I think ORMs are trying to address a real problem--namely that SQL (despite being high level) isn't very abstraction-friendly. Abstractions in SQL can be expensive and often unpredictably so, despite how clever databases are today. I think part of the problem is the mismatch between the largely imperative OO paradigm and the largely declarative relational paradigm, but I suspect that there's some semantic impedance between SQL and a truly relational model which contributes to the problem.