It seems the Prevayler or HAppS style of data storage & retrieval is what you and I want (and perhaps in their hearts, every other non-db-specialist as well)

Basically, you just define data structures in your language like you would any other piece of data, and it is silently in the background serialized into an efficient (I would hope) ACID datastore.

http://www.prevayler.org

http://happs.org