Bringing this back to see if anyone new has anything to add about this endless battle.

(Re-reading the mention of object databases above I should add, after researching the current state of the industry, they aren't quite ready for most applications. So RDBMS is still in charge..)

I still feel the same about ORM and while I will concede that there may be some situations where it's acceptable to take the risk of using one under ideal circumstances, I've yet to confidently identify what those ideal circumstances would be.