Magic is fine, but there should always be a path to do things sans pixie dust. For something like an ORM, that would be a path to retrieve the raw DB connection

Magic is fine, but there should always be a path to do things sans pixie dust. For something like an ORM, that would be a path to retrieve the raw DB connection to do things around / between queries. You even see the same pattern play out in programming languages; C# has the `dynamic` keyword that disables type checking on a variable.