"People writing CFML today use MVC frameworks, use ORM and the cloud."
But why? If they had to energy to create those frameworks, why didn't they invest it into moving on to a better technology?
Yet the OP mentions the <cfquery> tag, which is exactly the problem. It's mixing of the presentation (view) with a DB call (something that should be in a model and routed through a controller).
People writing CFML today use MVC frameworks, use ORM and the cloud. Yes it is still easy for beginners to write bad code, I think that may be more true in ColdFusion than in other languages. But getting started easily can also be a virtue.
You might be surprised but a lot of the ColdFusion community don't have tunnel vision and are familiar with a lot of other languages.
http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2061-Seven-Languages-In-Seven-W...
http://corfield.org/blog/post.cfm/learning-clojure
Sometimes another language is a better choice for a given task. We write CFML because we like it and are more productive in it, even if it isn't cool.