Earlier quoted context omitted.
SQL is an incredible language with decades of theory and implementation behind it. I have never found an ORM to be better or faster or more useful than hand-written SQL for anything but the simplest of queries, and even then the benefit is debatable.
99% of a CRUD app -- which is most of them -- is going to be simple CRUD stuff. Load a thing from database, let user edit it, save it. Doing that in 'plain' sql, even with templating, is repetitive and error prone. An ORM that didn't let you escape to SQL when you wanted to do more complex things would be a total failure, of course -- but to suggest that they're not more convenient for the 80/20 or even 90/10 use cas…
I strongly disagree that not wanting to add yet another abstraction layer onto a proven technology would be NIH.