What about Wordpress? They don't use an ORM do they?
I would posit that Wordpress is the wordwide leader in 'crappy PHP software.'
(And I'm not a PHP hater, my company writes 90% of our stuff in PHP, and WP works great for blogs and brochure sites. But it's nasty underneath that pretty UI.)
Yeah, I've found it a bit of a nightmare at times trying to integrate it into a website, in future I plan to just use a separate user system for the site and just link them.
I guess it depends how you measure good software. Wordpress works. Really well.
Wordpress has such a long history of catastrophic security flaws that it's become notorious among people (like me) who don't even use it.
I am probably not all the different from you. But I have been running Wordpress on my own server for years and have never had a problem.