I guess that's the luxury of being a shop that builds software vs. a shop that builds open source ORMs. We can target a single DB and technology, and not need to cater to thousands of angry devs with different naming conventions and religious views as to the virtues of Postgre vs MySql.
Wrapping a relational database with an object layer is really a simple, straightforward problem. It surprising that so many smart people feel compelled to spend so much time and effort engineering overly complex solutions to it.
Well, I work at a shop that builds software, but it's installed enterprise software, which means we don't fully control the deployment platform and have to support multiple databases. Control of the deployment model is definitely a huge, huge plus of a SaaS model, but the economics don't really work out for that in our industry. We also happen to write our own (currently closed-source) ORM framework to build on top of. One of the nice things about building our own framework is that we only have to deal with the complexities that we care about (i.e. our sort of performance requirements, our sort of object graphs, the databases our customers need).
The problem with pretty much any kind of framework, ORM or not, is that eventually it becomes bloated by being flexible enough to meet the requirements of thousands of different developers, meaning that any given one of them only ever uses a small percentage of the overall functional footprint. Keeping things simple yet powerful is definitely the hardest part about it all, especially given that different users have vastly different opinions about what's simple or what power they need.
Indeed. Building frameworks for other people just doesn't sound like any fun at all. We also rolled our own thing in house, and every once in a while we start thinking thoughts about polishing it up and releasing it to the world.
But the amount of polish that you need to turn an in-house thing into an open source project is just immense. And worse, by the time you have it flexible enough to handle every possible use case, you've bloated it out to the point where it's no fun to use anymore. Pick pretty much any off the shelf ORM to see the end result of that path.
Wrapping a relational database with an object layer is really a simple, straightforward problem. It surprising that so many smart people feel compelled to spend so much time and effort engineering overly complex solutions to it.