> I spent a good while trying to integrate Doctrine into my projects, and in the end I found it bloated and overly verbose and went back to PDO.

Were you integrating Doctrine, or were you integrating Doctrine/DBAL, as the parent poster recommends?

Doctrine/DBAL is a bunch of useful helpers around PDO which take out a lot of the repetitive coding (and let me delete many home-grown methods I'd created to 'help' PDO)

Doctrine is great for keeping rails on developers of various skill levels in large projects. But it does come at a cost of overhead.

Most of the time for simple crud operations it doesn't matter, as long as you handle proxy generation and caching correctly. It can add up when you try to write code working on datasets.

In those cases, I bypass doctrine and go direct to SQL.