I have felt the pain of Hibernate. It just sucks. But I think that it is possible to make an ORM like solution work. A great example is NeXT's EOF and now Apple's Core Data. The combo of awesome mapping tools and Objective-C's dynamism make for system that works very well for it's intended purpose. Mind you core data is not a database and likely would not work well for a web service, but I believe that EOF did.