Still, you are talking about round-trip overhead. As a counter-example, LedgerSMB is very databse-intensive but we do what we can to make sure round-trips are

Still, you are talking about round-trip overhead. As a counter-example, LedgerSMB is very databse-intensive but we do what we can to make sure round-trips are minimized. This means making sure that everything that needs to be queried together is queried together, in the same query. I suppose if you are doing a lot with ORMs and the like though that may not be an option.