I believe the difference here is that one is an ORM framework, while the other is just objects bound to a database.
ORM frameworks usually allow you to drop down to SQL. But then you're stuck in that terrible world of depending on poorly-documented and soon-to-be-deprecated (or already deprecated) internals. Which are pretty much guaranteed to not fit what you really need anyway. Then you have to bridge your hack objects with the "proper" ORM objects. Your crufty hack objects will probably never be seen as first-class citizens in ORM land, forever banished to edge case hell.
Of course reddit is flawed. Anyone that has spent time on Slashdot or Advogato could have told you the whole premise of up/down voting is beyond silly.
No, the utility of up/down votes is in retention. It's nothing more than a Skinner box that people check in on to see if they are winning or losing. Which is how Digg and Reddit both became huge in a short amount of time.
Do you know Slashdot's system? jhmarten wasn't criticizing community-based moderation, only the simplistic model of up/down voting, when compared to ones which get users to specify why they're voting.
Compared to Reddit as a whole, yes, but that's because Reddit is a collection of disparate subreddits, not a single common area. Slashdot had 5.5 million users in its heyday, which is on the same order of magnitude of the biggest subreddits.
I've never seen anyone completely write IBM and Microsoft out of computing history by such absurd degree as this.