Is it just me who thinks that plain SQL has won the SQL vs ORM battle? I mean why should I learn how to use X different ORM syntaxes in Y different languages and in addition to that lose full control over the actual query.

Big fan of queries being written in SQL and yielding pure, properly structured business objects.

An example of this approach is PureORM[0]

[0]https://github.com/craigmichaelmartin/pure-orm