I'm curious why almost no one uses ORM these days? At least in C# and seemingly in PHP it's not only easier, but can even be as performant, or more performant if used correctly. But the major part is, it allows databases to be pluggable... Thats like my whole thing with my C# framework. Bring just about any database you want, or build your own connector.
For my own uses, using compiled and cached stored procedures was just slightly slower than using ORM. I suppose I could have been using the databases incorrectly but that seems to be the consensus, and no need to handle migrations or db setup scripts!