I don't think they're necessarily misguided. DataMapper made efforts to circumvent the N+1 problem, in most cases probably pretty effectively.
Partial Updates are also pretty easy. Slamming every field into every INSERT/UPDATE is obviously a bad idea.
I think the missing sauce for ORMs is funding. Getting the basics together takes time and money, and it's hard to pull off in your free time.
On the other hand, having written many an ORM, I think there's still plenty of room to advance the state of the art. One of the biggest untapped (AFAIK) opportunities is using Statistics for query tuning. It's the life-blood of databases, but statistics are noticeably lacking in ORMs. Even simple counters could allow you to tune lazy-loads, JOINs, pre-fetches, etc on-the-fly.
I don't think they're necessarily misguided. DataMapper made efforts to circumvent the N+1 problem, in most cases probably pretty effectively.
Partial Updates are also pretty easy. Slamming every field into every INSERT/UPDATE is obviously a bad idea.
I think the missing sauce for ORMs is funding. Getting the basics together takes time and money, and it's hard to pull off in your free time.
On the other hand, having written many an ORM, I think there's still plenty of room to advance the state of the art. One of the biggest untapped (AFAIK) opportunities is using Statistics for query tuning. It's the life-blood of databases, but statistics are noticeably lacking in ORMs. Even simple counters could allow you to tune lazy-loads, JOINs, pre-fetches, etc on-the-fly.