OOP is an excellent tool when it is used to support separation of concerns. I'm actually working on a system where they lumped all the functions together, didn't try to separate them by obvious domain entities. This is inconvenient, but it is not nearly as bad as a poorly designed OOP framework. The problem that I see with the frameworks is not enough people ask the question "what does it really buy me ?". For instance relational databases give a huge benefit in ACID transactions, a query language that gives correct results, you can dynamically update tables without breaking things, dynamically join tables to give new kinds of results, etc.. So paying the price to use SQL to acess your data is not bad, because you get so much back. But what exaclty are you getting back from using a framework like Hibernate in between you and the database ? And where is the proof that ORM is even a good idea ? There seems to be an idea - if it is OO it is good, and if a lot of people are using it it must be good. I think these two assumptions are the real problem.