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.

It sounds to me that you saying that SQL is hard because you’d rather learn the intricacies of an ORM.

Also, this whole point predicates upon the assumption that ORMs are infallible when translating queries into SQL, which most definitely are not.