my 'go to' recently has been - use the basic ORM if I'm dealing with one (or maybe a small handful) of things where I'm doing work local to the request on those

my 'go to' recently has been - use the basic ORM if I'm dealing with one (or maybe a small handful) of things where I'm doing work local to the request on those specific items. use just a query builder that returns a raw array for times when it's just being shipped down in JSON to a client. The overhead of full ORM - converting to full objects internally - often for hundreds or thousands of records - is not worth whatever small conveniences might be afforded via a full ORM usage.