I half agree with you and half totally disagree with you.
The happy medium is a flexible ORM that automates the repetitive stuff but let's you call out to the higher level stuff...because if you don't have that your developers are going to end up building their own awful ORM-ish layer to automate the repetitive stuff anyway.
And I sort of half agree with you as well :) except I think the repetitive part is the mapping of the objects of which I think the automation should be of generating objects that you are going to map into.
In Java there are host of libraries that do this. I have even used Hibernate to do the mapping at times as I do think it does a pretty good job of that.
What I mean by mapping is minimal code generation (either host language or SQL) of Class <-> Entity and Row result <-> Object.
I think jOOQ approaches that medium you talk about fairly well btw. JDBI and MyBatis are also fairly good as well (both mapping technologies).
The happy medium is a flexible ORM that automates the repetitive stuff but let's you call out to the higher level stuff...because if you don't have that your developers are going to end up building their own awful ORM-ish layer to automate the repetitive stuff anyway.