The experience I've had with Hibernate is that its semantics are subtle, and when there's problems, it's a bit hard to understand what's going wrong under the hood. I've heard from a friend that often one starts with Criteria, then needs a bit more flexibility and needs HQL, and later notices that after all, raw SQL is needed (for example, Hibernate doesn't have union AFAIK).
Also with ORM, people easily tend to overuse existing mappings/models, which leads to that there's an object with lots of attributes that aren't initiliazed. So after the query, inside transaction Hibernate makes additional data fetching, which leads to potential slow down. Also sadly, the hibernate model object is sometimes leaked into the view architecture layer, and then we see LazyInitializationExceptions.
To use ORM, one should really understand it. Unfortunately one gets easily impression that it's easy while it's not.
