I personally share your tendencies. But what I'd say is that SQL Alchemy provides a great substrate API for doing exactly what you are talking about. In those

I personally share your tendencies. But what I'd say is that SQL Alchemy provides a great substrate API for doing exactly what you are talking about. In those cases where you need to compose SQL, it can save you a ton of time with a SQL composition API (rather than building your own strings). That is the basis of how SQL Alchemy builds up its ORM functionality. So if you are working on a project where you can save some time using the ORM, but prefer to work closer to SQL, you've got a great mix.