ORM - good or bad ?

I am digging into Hibernate / JPA stuff. I understand the difficulty to have two paradigms in one software ( relational vs object oriented). But still I wonder. Are these ORM frameworks really helping or are they creating more difficulties than they solve ?

What I am sure is that most of the problem they solve should not be solved. For example database independence. That's important just because vendors don't care about standards. Who cares about SQL:2003 - not talking 2008. So we add one extra layer just to hide the absence of standardization. One may argue that's common to most standards. Well may be but I think here it not that justified.

Any way, I find very unpleasing to see so little integration of tools. Again Java stuff, is not providing common sense solution to every day solutions. Why do we have to research and go through a painful learning curve for achieving something pretty easy with VB.

So lets continue searching... agility, elegance, flexibility, power, openness and productivity !