See Chapter 4 of the Persistence in the Enterprise Book for a questionnaire to use to make the determination in your own culture and environment. Chapter 10 summarizes the evaluations we make for
JDBC, iBatis, Hibernate Core, Open JPA and PureQuery in one place for easy reference.
I have also been driving IBM towards an approach called
Pattern based Engineering, which is all about developing your own best practices and capturing various templates to automate the tedious, error prone parts.
The reason I bring it up is that every framework is going to have some disadvantages in your specific circumstances. By using a templating engine, you can pretty easily "paper over" them until they improve. It also makes it easier to switch frameworks underneath the covers.
I hint at this in Chapter 10. For more details, check out chapter 16 of a recent IBM Redbook:
Strategic Reuse with Asset based Development (IBM Redbook):
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/sg247529.html?Open Ok then, Geoff