Have ORMs introduced extra complexity into our codebase?

ORM is definitely a good thing when used appropriately. It becomes bad when developers do not understand the ORM framework. Or the garbage collection framework. However, I have recently read articles doing a comparision between different ORM framework performance. The performance of EF fared relatively lower than its peers like NHibernate or Spring.Net.

Having said that, I really love the simplicity of a lean DAL via SqlHelper classes. Using SqlHelpers with stored procedures allow developers to understand the SQL queries better and what goes on SQL server like execution plans.

One of the comments on the article hit the nail on the head: People shouldn't use ORMs because they don't want to write SQL, they should use ORMs so that they can populate their business objects in their code.