That's true. I guess what I have in mind are ORMs like Active Record, which adds all sorts of magical layers on top the query building, but still somehow gets t

That's true. I guess what I have in mind are ORMs like Active Record, which adds all sorts of magical layers on top the query building, but still somehow gets the some of the basics wrong, like being able to select arbitrary values easily, or making OR queries an intuitive mess.