>I totally get that people roll up functionality into classes (DAL for example). But when you look at all the lines of code people wrote to get that working on their projects compared to EF out of the box you start to see the advantages.
>

But then look at the things you learn along the way. Isn't that part of the gardening? :)

From my own perspective, I learned a good bit about the inner workings of ADO.NET, Generics, and stored procs by spinning my own DAL. There are many stories out there like that. Sure, out of the box EF provides value But value comes from many sources, and that's basically my point.

Here's another example - Change Data Capture in SQL 2008 reduces (doesn't eliminate) the need for triggers. And as much as I wish they'd implemented CDC earlier, many developers who got their hands dirty for years with triggers wound up learning other things along the way.