What's wrong with hibernate? The only thing I can think of is that you're not using "JOIN FETCH entity.relation" when accessing collections and end up with the N+1 select problem but that is because you're using any ORM incorrectly.

Entity framework has include and active record has includes which do the same thing. The qt ORM also has something similar.

The only ORM I have seen that lacks this critical feature is odb. It doesn't allow setting the fetching strategy on a per query basis. You have to either always use eager loading or lazy loading which basically makes it useless for my purposes.

Well, for benchmarking the essential framework, which does not mandate any ORM, I would want to use something for data access that takes the question of time spent on type reflection, internal caching, and the like, out of the picture. Hibernate and EMF have their place, but not as part of benchmarking the thing that hosts 'em. Core Dropwizard performance is all about how it uses Jetty, Jackson, and maps requests to resources and operations.