Comment by luckylion

But there's also value gained in it, isn't there? I very much like doctrine's query builders and being able to analyze and manipulate queries programmatically, e.g. dynamically add a filter to a query and a join if needed. That's pretty simple with a query builder once you've gotten comfortable with the concept and the ORM itself, but it's pretty hard to do with plain sql unless you write plenty of specific code to handle all the known things you might care about.