Sure, but how many times have you seen someone create something equal to that with SQL queries? Instead of using a join, they execute a SELECT against the datab

Sure, but how many times have you seen someone create something equal to that with SQL queries? Instead of using a join, they execute a SELECT against the database for every row they fetch. This is shockingly common in horribly written PHP code. In addition, ActiveRecord also supports joins instead of using includes. Includes is almost always fine, unless the initial result set is large (100+ rows).