This opinion is often offered by people with a limited exposure to Entity beans, and/or those who have only used them in one container that might have Entity bean support that is not so good. Also, the features of CMP have improved substantially in
EJB 2.0 over EJB 1.0 and 1.1, so some people's experiences are rather out of date.
In fact, there are many, many projects using Entity beans (at least CMP) that are very, very happy with both their capabilities and their performance.
Kyle