I've used ORMs quite a bit and I agree with you, but the advantage for me has been getting the database objects into your application, and to a lesser degree good ORMs providing a schema for other code to integrate with.

It's not super popular but I've been using Scala's Quill quite a bit lately. I don't think it's an ORM exactly, it's more like LINQ and automatic mapping between the database and case classes, but it's really nice and does everything I want from an ORM.