jOOQ is legit. I found it very helpful to read jOOQ as I was writing my own library in python. There's a huge difference between a query-builder and something like hibernate or sqlalchemy.
Query-builders make it easy to compose queries, leaning on your programming language to enforce syntactic correctness. When you're dealing with SQL directly, composition means string concatenation. A query builder gives you a data-structure that represents a query.
I think it's helpful to distinguish between query-building and object mapping when the "orm-vs-sql" thing comes up.
