ORMs make the obvious and easy things even easier. They don't help out as much with the hard stuff. The hard things are still hard regardless if you have an ORM or not, but just because an ORM doesn't solve everything it doesn't mean you should throw the baby out with the bath water.
You rarely have to "unpack everything", you usually just need to go down a level of abstraction or two to get at the actual database driver in specific parts of code.
The trade off of using an ORM is still almost always worth it in my experience, but it certainly depends on what your app does.
You rarely have to "unpack everything", you usually just need to go down a level of abstraction or two to get at the actual database driver in specific parts of code.
The trade off of using an ORM is still almost always worth it in my experience, but it certainly depends on what your app does.