Using the Django ORM my application is built much more quickly than if I were to write SQL by hand. That matters more to me than most anything else, especially

Using the Django ORM my application is built much more quickly than if I were to write SQL by hand. That matters more to me than most anything else, especially since the performance is perfectly reasonable and caching helps for the rest. Of course I still have to add indexes and certain constraints/triggers by hand, but the payoff is huge. One could also say that the more you know about SQL and RDBMS's, the better you are able to properly use an ORM.