Seriously, it's easy to work with and doesn't get in my way. The fact that it may take a few more ms to do some things that probably aren't my bottleneck doesn't matter.
EF seems very much targeted towards "enterprisey" line of business apps, where ease of development is critical and performance is a side note. Microsoft just does not care to make a high-performance web stack. Even in the next generation of Visual Studio ASP.NET MVC stuff is still an optional download. How many production sites in the world are using EF? Microsoft is still very much mired in the idea of selling tools to developers who tend to be on the lowest rung of the skill-tree and who build mediocre internal apps at big companies. They're solution to scaling and efficiency is to buy bigger boxes, higher end Windows licenses, and more of them.
That strategy has certainly fattened their wallets handsomely over the last several decades, but it's ultimately self-defeating. By failing to capture the most skilled developers, and by failing to cater to the most critical development needs (high-throughput business critical web services being a prime example) they have been alienating such developers. And those developers are ultimately the ones who set the standards (in some cases literally, when they are in positions of power at large companies) that other developers tend to follow. And that momentum can be difficult to break. By the time MS realizes it they will be obsolete faster than they can react. And it won't be because the entire world changed overnight, it'll be because the world has been changing for a long long time and it will have finally caught up to their core business.
