Ask HN: Why do people use hibernate (or any ORM)?

I dont get it. Why is the everybody so keen on extending the development time of a project by using Hibernate? what are the real benefits of hibernate? Please dont say 'database independance' because this can be acheived simply with Spring and JDBC - along with connection pooling and transactions management etc.

Why do people think the concept of a foreign key is analgeous to class relationships? Why do people want their database/storage/persistance layer to bleed into their domain/application layer?

AND would we be doing things differently if database vendors supported a 'standard' SQL?