You should either use NHibernate, SubSonic or wait for EDM/LinQ in the upcoming ASP.NET so you won't deal with 5-6 lines of ADO.NET code.

But I have to agree with you, it's not that straightforward to understand ASP.NET esp if you have previous knowledge of developing web-app because ASP.NET tries to abstract everything out for you (via their Controls, ViewState etc).

On the other side, ASP.NET might not be discipline in terms of MVC but then again it is ridiculously easy to re-create a GridView such that I don't care much about the VC part of the MVC. I write less code thanks to Visual Web Developer tool.