Agreed. After spending the better part of a decade watching Hibernate a) fail to scale or b) get confused beyond a third level of association, I find myself writing bare SQL and/or refactoring to implement the repository model. ORMs are great for prototyping or if your data model is simple; beyond that you're better off without them.

Most higher level regular programming languages will allow you to escape to C, and C allows you to escape to assembly, so that's not unusual.

In my experience when you need to escape to raw SQL there is still some kind of query builder employed, which too becomes another "compile to SQL" source.