"takes a bunch of code to do anything at all."

I presume you mean the boilerplate code to bind variables and such. If you're not a fan of OCI why not use JDBC, ODBC, cx_Oracle etc, you don't need to use OCI, there are many other interfaces that make life easier. OCI is the low level interface for programmers not scared of a few lines of code. You'll find that you quickly abstract away the boilerplate in your application, and it's really not that hard. OCI has been around for a long time...