After using Hibernate on most of my projects for about 8 years, I've landed on a company that discourages its use and wants applications to only interact with the DB through stored procedures.

After doing this for a couple of weeks, I haven't been able to create a rich domain model of the application I'm starting to build, and the application just looks like a (horrible) transactional script.

Some of the issues I've found are:

• Cannot navigate object graph as the stored procedures just load the minimum amount of data, which means that sometimes we have similar objects with different fields. One example is: we have a stored procedure to retrieve all the data from a customer, and another to retrieve account information plus a few fields from the customer.
• Lots of the logic ends up in helper classes, so the code becomes more structured (with entities used as old C structs).
• More boring scaffolding code, as there's no framework that extracts result sets from a stored procedure and puts it in an entity.

My questions are:

• has anyone been in a similar situation and didn't agree with the store procedure approch? what did you do?
• Is there an actual benefit of using stored procedures? appart from the silly point of "no one can issue a drop table".
• Is there a way to create a rich domain using stored procedures? I know that there's the posibility of using AOP to inject DAOs/Repositories into entities to be able to navigate the object graph. I don't like this option as it's very close to voodoo.