It's not just for newbies. I'm competent with SQL, but that doesn't mean I enjoy writing query after query. We use Django and utilize the ORM... we jump down in

It's not just for newbies. I'm competent with SQL, but that doesn't mean I enjoy writing query after query. We use Django and utilize the ORM... we jump down into SQL in the (rare) case that we really need too. I'm sure at higher scale (we're mid-level at this point) that we might be hand tuning more and more, but that hasn't happened yet.