Frankly, getting a niche wouldn't hurt me any.
Cecil

>Understanding ADO.NET is never wasted In my honest opinion but the main advantage of pure ADO would be that it's not easy to Fox it. If you're worried about that, you might look at nHibernate but it won't match the papers, presentations, blogs etc you can expect from MVPs and incentivized others about a MS release. The upcoming POCO is lightweight, not backend-centric, is very accessible wrt change tracking and databinding. If you get in early, you might be recognized as an expert yourself. ;-)