I actually make this calculation for most projects that I work on -- what level of traffic do I expect this to see? If it's a back-office function or is limited

I actually make this calculation for most projects that I work on -- what level of traffic do I expect this to see? If it's a back-office function or is limited to a few hundred clients at a time, I don't even worry about performance. But that said... writing native SQL queries wastes a month? Um, no. ORMs are convenient, but writing select, insert, update, and delete queries by hand isn't that hard. It's mildly verbose and you end up repeating yourself lots so it's annoying, particularly if you (like me) have the kind of programmer's mind that constantly wants to factor that out. But it's doable without adding a high factor to development time.