Django ORM and SQLAlchemy are both good. They're easy enough to break out of when you want to handcraft more obscure SQL and at the same time they save a massiv

Django ORM and SQLAlchemy are both good. They're easy enough to break out of when you want to handcraft more obscure SQL and at the same time they save a massive amount of boilerplate. Some languages - particularly languages with overly rigid and static type systems - are ill suited for building ORMs, so the ORMs in those languages will probably always suck. I think attachment to those languages is what drives some people to think that "ORMs always suck".