> 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.

Were you integrating Doctrine, or were you integrating Doctrine/DBAL, as the parent poster recommends?

Doctrine/DBAL is a bunch of useful helpers around PDO which take out a lot of the repetitive coding (and let me delete many home-grown methods I'd created to 'help' PDO)