> Much of the complexity of this system is designed to give you a specific feature: migrations abstracted from your database. In my opinion, if there is somethi

> Much of the complexity of this system is designed to give you a specific feature: migrations abstracted from your database. In my opinion, if there is something less likely to happen than writing a complex app to run on interchangeable databases, it's the need to repeat the same history of migrations. Unless you have a dev, staging, and prod setup. Then there's a good chance you'll encounter a wide range of variation in the current database schema compared to your models. I use the ability to roll back and forward migrations all the time. Django ORM and the migrations (and the admin site) are the features that make it impossible for me to justify the use of other frameworks or languages in the vast majority of cases. The productivity boon is just too much. With that said, I have a personal policy of not letting the ORM get in the way. If I find myself reaching out to the documentation for how to write a particular query (something like window functions, for example), that's a good indication that I may be better off writing the raw SQL.