I'm all for abstracting. I like Rails, for example. That said, it gets truly difficult to add or change stuff at the more abstract layers. For example, adding recursive querying to an existing ORM is tough. And on the rare occasion that there is a bug in the abstract layer, debugging that from the normal application code is also tough.

I understand why some corporations prefer dumb boilerplate everywhere for some applications. If there is an outage it's usually easy to fix quickly. Sometimes it's not, if it's a issue in the boilerplate (say, Feb 29 rolls around and all of the boilerplate assumed a 28 day month) that means a huge update all across the system, but that rarely happens in practice.