People will try to reinvent the same thing over-and-over - mostly because of missing core knowledge. So the cycle will go this way: discard ORM and use native SQL queries. Make your own management of what has changed and what not. Make your own (object) relationship/collection management. Make your own caches of loaded objects. And - the most non-obvious but the real deal-breaker: deal with complex updates where MANY objects are involved. Then they will come and start praising ORM. Because they learned the core knowledge...