I totally share your frustrations over ORMs and the issues they cause, but I seriously doubt your cost calculations. The sheer number of working CRUD applications that don’t rely on fancy queries is mind-boggling, and most developers engaging in high-level system design seem mostly oblivious to this. The ORM may not make for pretty or efficient queries, but it enables armies of mediocre programmers to crunch out generic line of business applications very fast. The performance of these apps may not be what it could be, but while we are still busy discussing the finer details of query planner optimisation, folks are making a fortune with N+1 queries in production that virtually nobody cares about.