> You might claim that you don’t use an ORM in your code, but in effect you are just implementing your own idea of an ORM. If you are just peppering queries around your model then it might be a very lightweight ORM, but the fact is you are still Mapping Objects to Relations and vice-versa.
Well said. If you don't use an ORM and you don't write SQL queries in your model methods, you're likely practicing poor OO design.