"...They are an acceptable way to represent a data definition, but a poor way to write queries and a bad way to store object state." Rails perspective: Pump your brakes there, friend. This claim depends completely on your application's needs. I write web apps for research that don't need to scale and don't need lighting performance. I have built apps that ended up needing some optimized-SQL-versus-ActiveRecord experimentation, and sometimes, writing raw queries is certainly worth it. AR has been evolving for 15 years, is extremely useful, and all that is needed for many use cases. We're not all trying to do the same thing.