Ive actually found the annotate framework can do most primitive GROUP BY queries (and in the next release or two will gain a lot more power, as its a big focus)

Ive actually found the annotate framework can do most primitive GROUP BY queries (and in the next release or two will gain a lot more power, as its a big focus). Additionally, many of the other weird queries I need can be expresset with the queryset.extra() command, which means I get to keep working with querysets. All this support is only a few versions old though, so 5 years ago it definitely was much worse.