I am definitely looking to develop a good story for ORM. However, I don't think it has to be in the very core of the framework -- allowing people to plug a different one (or not use one at all) is important.

I chose Play! (1.x) because it is by far the most productive development environment I have ever used (especially for boring business admin pages). (Out of Django, JSP, Lift, GSE/GXP, Jetty, etc).