[eluser]toopay[/eluser]
This is not just about "I write wrappers that encapsulate common coding patterns" nor "speed-benchmarking" tests.
AR is initially simpler to understand and faster to write than SQL-based model code. Its efficiency in the early stages of any project is adequate. Unfortunately, these advantages disappear as the project increases in complexity: the abstraction breaks down, forcing the dev to use and understand SQL. Entirely anecdotally, based my own experience of PHP back-end development, the abstraction of AR breaks down not for 20% of projects, but close to 100% of them. Objects are not an adequate way of expressing the results of relational queries. The inadequacy of the mapping of queries to objects leads to a fundamental inefficiency in AR-backed applications that is pervasive, distributed, and therefore not easily fixed without abandoning AR entirely.
