I'm not arguing that people shouldn't learn SQL, I'm just saying that a lot of people who bemoan all ORMs should try using a really good one —like Django's— and

I'm not arguing that people shouldn't learn SQL, I'm just saying that a lot of people who bemoan all ORMs should try using a really good one —like Django's— and see if all their complaints still ring true. Your examples, for example, might have been true a while ago but: - Extra conditions on a join (eg a prefetch filter): https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/ref/models/querysets/#django.db.models.Prefetch https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/ref/models/querysets/#... - I'm not sure what you think you'd want explicit subqueries for, at least in a context that annotations, prefetch, etc don't already do. If it's that weird, just use `.extra(..)` - Conditional aggregates: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/ref/models/conditional-expressions/ https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/ref/models/conditional... - Not that you asked but also have a look at the new database functions stuff. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38017076/annotate-a-comma-separated-list-of-related-items-onto-django-queryset http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38017076/annotate-a-comma... And it keeps getting better. The list of "ORMs are rubbish because I can't do X" is evaporating. Yeah there's probably some stuff that never comes up but you can still run raw SQL through the ORM. When you consider the development time saved and performance improvements (caching, good query writing, etc) an ORM delivers, I personally think it's hard to argue against them.