I think you're right. I've lost count of how many times I've seen people reimplement PDO from scratch just to mould the whole ensamble to something they find familiar instead of just extending it.

Also, like programminggeek says there's a lot of confusion as to where exactly the logic would go in a MVC project leaving developers to pick... wherever to put it. Of course that leads it to change from project to project and even from programmer to programmer in the same project sometimes.