That's a fair criticism about auditing. Doing it through database triggers avoids the problem with audits being missed because of code that doesn't participate in the Hibernate lifecycle (including native SQL queries and Criteria updates, yikes!).

I will also concede that under some circumstances it's too slow to bring the data to the code, and instead you have to bring the code to the data (i.e. PL/PGSQL). The sort of speedup is mostly from eliminating round trips and data marshaling, however. That's not quite a like-for-like comparison of an ORM vs a mapper.

The reason I stick to ORMs is mostly because of RAD tools that save me so much time. For instance, JHipster generates liquibase migrations and JPA entities. This gives me a relational schema very quickly. To avoid any "surprise" queries that tank performance, I do turn Hibernate's statement logging on when developing new features.

Next time if I can find some more tools to help with an SQL-only + stored procedure approach, I'll give it a deeper consideration. Maybe convince your company to open source some of tools it has developed!