Dapper really is such a weird edge case. You still write all the sql, all it does is the conversion from a type to the input parameters and the returned rows into objects where the row names match the parameters of the class. Frankly I feel like that's the right way to build ORMs in all languages that have the facilities to manage it (and maybe those that don't you pass in a function pointer to do the dumping of rows into type for you)

What sort of horrible experiences have you actually had with ORMs? Every time I've used one it's been an absolute joy, I hate repeating myself in my DB, in SQL, in mapping code and again in application code. The main thing I see people complaining about is performance edgecases, but for small and mid scale applications these can never take away the massive DRY principle gain good ORMs provide.

And almost every usage of Dapper relies heavily on generics.