I can't speak for everyone, but the reason I choose to use an ORM over writing all my SQL by hand is time and maintenance cost. I can write one SQL query to perform CRUD operations for a model almost as quickly as I could use a ORM. The problem is that it produces 10 times as much code to read and interprete. If I write the SQL code for another model, 90% of that new code is exactly the same as the last. I am bleeding duplication everywhere.