I'm not a fan of the LINQ syntax itself so much as the fact that I'm not longer dealing with arbitrary strings being smashed together that happen to form a valid SQL statement, and all the benefits that inevitably come with not having stringly-typed logic (like being able to refactor properly, type safety, proper autocomplete, no-typos-at-runtime, etc). It maps closely enough to SQL itself that the negatives of having to use an "intermediate" language/api aren't significant, and the magic can be made negligible, so it's largely pure gains.