Is there an EntityFramework "Light"?

Question

we started a new ASP.NET MVC Project with EF and .Net 4.5. Original plan was to use code first to create the database, but that seemed a bit too complicated, probably mostly because all of us were familiar with DB-designs and it seemed just much easier and faster to do everything in SQL.

So for now we use EF to simply create mappers for our tables, views and functions. Stored Procedures don't really want to work for us automatically, so we are calling those manually with SqlCommand. Now a problem sometimes emerges with the complex connection string and all the XML-files which need to be referred in it. (At least which are referred when we use the automatically created connection string).

Long story short - EF has many features, of which we probably use only a hand full. We would be probably much happier with Linq2Sql. But that one is obsolete, and few months ago I read some scary posts, that when you want to launch your application in Azure, DB connections can break, and EF (from version 5 or 6) is so awesome and renews them automatically.

Is this true and EF the only usable ORM mapper for azure? Can we somehow deactivate all those features we don't use to have something as simple as Linq2Sql, should we use directly Linq2Sql even though it is obsolete, or just learn to deal with all those features? Or is the answer to use NHibernate (which seems to have a much more straight forward XML-configuration file, but no simple integration with Visual Studio to create all necessary classes)?

Update: Another reason we gave up on code first and reverse engineered code first was, that we were missing an easy way to create wrapper functions for our SQL Server - stored functions. This feature is provided with the DB-first use of EF (as we use it)