I spent a good while trying to integrate Doctrine into my projects, and in the end I found it bloated and overly verbose and went back to PDO.<p>I am sure that it has valid use cases, but for a lot of straightforward PHP projects, it&#x27;s complete overkill and adds more work than it saves (in my opinion of course).<p>I agree with knowing PDO though, I would say that&#x27;s required knowledge for any self-respecting PHP developer.