[galbar]

For whatever it is worth, I have reached the same conclusion and I have been building systems like you describe for the last few years.

Recently I changed jobs. In the new team they love their ORM with all the foreign keys and direct mapping between business logic data objects and the database schema.

Needless to say, it is a mess. Despite all the automated tooling they have around migrations that "should make it easy" to change things, the reality is that the whole application depends on what the database schemas look like and migrating the existing representation to a new one would break everything.

This has become an elephant in the room that nobody talks about and everyone works around.