If texts and lists were easy to use, nobody would have invented structures, objects and the other thousands of abstractions available on modern languages.

An ORM will give you a description of the database you can use by reflection, and an abstraction layer that avoids using hard to use lists and tables. The first one is way more usefull than the later, but both are good things.

Also, application servers are normaly much more numerous than database servers, and much easier to scale up. Thus, anything that offloads work from the database to the application will simplify your environment when you grow.