SQL is fine, no problem with it unless you are embedding queries in a OO application and you are forced to hack mapping layer between the two interfaces, which gives you two options, either compromise performance for the sake of development easiness or vice versa.
I’ve played a bit with Jeremy Evans’s Sequel (http://sequel.jeremyevans.net), and I’m not sure that ORMs are necessarily constrained along this dichotomy (easy to use but with poor performance vs great performance but hard to use). Sequel seems to be about making the hard things easy and reducing the amount of time you need to drop to pure SQL to almost zero.
As someone who has built with Oracle’s Pro C(++) and with various ORMs, Sequel is an ORM that makes me reasonably happy and gives me the expressiveness of embedded SQL without compromising my object model.
