Here you can find an extensive list of Java ORMs and persistence solutions. Not all of the follows Hibernate/JPAs approach, some of them are quite easy by design.
Of course there are solutions not listed on that site, i.e. Spring JDBC with templates, etc.. And this is my personal choice for projects that require fast, easy to build JDBC access and are already using Spring.
In general, for me at least, it's a little bit to early to say Hibernate is bad and it grown to big. It serves it's purpose quite well, but grown to fit to many shoes. My personal opinion is that it will stay as it is, but NoSQL solutions will probably give birth to a new breed of Java data mapping solutions, like Spring Data. There is a need to create a simple approach to interact with application data, but I don't believe there is a consensus on how to get there... yet.
