My preference is stored procedures plus service locators, to be honest. It enables a degree of loose coupling and even dynamic discovery that ORMs are generally not well suited to.
But I think the difference may be bigger. ORMs make sense when you want a database for your application. They break down badly when you want an application for your database. Usually I tend to want the latter.
I'm in the first group, and I think many are when evaluating ORMs or having an opinion about them. Being in the latter, I more understand you concerns.