Any ORM can handle joins. There are certain types of joins / aggregations / whatever that are harder for ORMs to support, and thinking that this is the fault of

Any ORM can handle joins. There are certain types of joins / aggregations / whatever that are harder for ORMs to support, and thinking that this is the fault of the ORM births monstrosities like Hibernate. ActiveRecord for me hits a sweet spot in that it covers most of what you would need to do day-to-day in SQL and gives you easy ways to bypass it if you need to do something more complicated. The biggest issue with ActiveRecord IMO is Rails devs who feel that falling down to raw SQL when it's warranted is wrong, and end up building insanely unreadable garbage using ARel (which in and of itself isn't a bad library, but should almost never be used in "high-level" code.)