I like to say "ORMs make easy thing easier and hard things harder".

What i mean by that is, any simple CRUD operations are much easier in ORM. The hard things, i mean any complex queries that need more than one join you are probably better of writing yourself.

In the end i prefer to do inserts, updates and deletes with ORM (or some other database abstraction tools) but most SELECTs i write myself, fetching exactly what i need and mapping result to objects if needed manually.