A lot of problems stated are characteristic of any ORM not just Django. People pick ORMs specifically for trading convenience and tooling with loss of control.

A lot of problems stated are characteristic of any ORM not just Django. People pick ORMs specifically for trading convenience and tooling with loss of control. Any escape hatches that the ORM provides is by definition hacky. These days when I know it’s a long term project, I prefer laying out the domain entities as plain classes and wrapping database operations as class methods with raw database statements. This lets me use the underlying databases to its full potential and gives me enough control without leaking database code into application logic.