I think ORMs do a fine job, excellent even. The problem is that you may be using O's which require a lot of M'ing to from the R's ;)

So if you don't do mainstream OO, then you probably don't ever need ORM. SQL databases are powerful relational engines in their own right - many ORMs have to replicate a lot of that functionality into their memory based stuff (which can be good, but its more work).

I guess its all slowly fading, as I am led to believe the trend is away from relational data to distributed data, which has a different set of problems...