I agree. We use our own lightweight ORM at Twitpic (similar to PHP ActiveRecord). It produces SQL for you unless you feed it your own optimized query, but "does the right thing" 99.9% of the time.
IMO, "ORM produces bad SQL" is a myth and more often a case of bad indexes and not bad SQL.
IMO, "ORM produces bad SQL" is a myth and more often a case of bad indexes and not bad SQL.