Jeff I can’t thank you enough for this post. I have been battling it out with a few developers on our CSK forums (Commerce Starter Kit) regarding OR/M and how much I hate it. The interesting thing is that most of these guys (as you mention) like it in concept but have never actually had to support it. I have, and every time I’ve removed it (Gentle, NHib, NetTiers).
I take a hard line on this: OR/M is laziness and serves programmers, not clients. You stick thousands of lines of code between your DB and BLL and you’re going to tell me your coding for speed and scalability? Never.
Vietnam is not a bit of an insensitive analogy (lives aren’t lost using OR/M … well except for the devs who throw themselves out a window once they realize how limited they are with it).