I've created my own, without the bloat. (Though i need to update my on-site sources)
I created it with exactly the points in mind you mention: no dozens of xml files, no huge framework, just simple constructors with database to property mappigns and it does your basic CRUD / Find / Join stuff. For most of the stuff i do, i don't even need to write custom queries.
I've written all of this before on my site also, make sure to check out the basic examples to get the idea of it.
The next version i'll release comes with working one-line join on join on join (to walk a 'path' through your database), ini based database settings, cross database support, super-simple database abstraction and a standard logger that falls back to SQLite if your database is down.
Just give a shout if you're interested in the updates, i'll put a rush to it then.
Oh yeah and don't forget, there's also nice visual scaffold generator called Pork.Generator. It tries to analyze your database structure and find 1:1 1:many and many:many relations, and can automatically generate the classes for you :-)
(source: schizofreend.nl)
