ORM[suggestion]

I down vote this because as the platform moves forward if we make a ORM standard then add on developers will depend on the ORM being in the system and may make there add on's to CI use the ORM. If you then drop in somebodies CodeIgniter add on into your project which uses the ORM because it was "easier" then you have 2 choices. Re-write their code to not use the ORM or accept that, that CodeIgniter add-on could become a bottle-neck for the rest of your project as the project grows (and therefore need to rewrite it then).

Like others have said a ORM is great for rapid prototyping but once a system goes production it's just a bottleneck.
I guess it comes down to programmers looking for the easy solution or programmers looking to build the project to be as efficient as possible from the start.

https://github.com/ProjectOrangeBox / https://github.com/dmyers2004