Working efficiently with legacy database using Dapper

A year ago I started working on a set of projects that requires accessing data from a huge legacy database. There was a decision to use Dapper to facilitate database access code. For those of you who are not familiar with Dapper, it’s a set of extension methods to IDbConnection, which allows to easily map C# object to SQL query parameters, as well as SQL query result to C# objects. I was quite skeptical to use a library that requires writing SQL queries directly in the C# code, because I got used to relying always on ORMs (NHibernate in particular).