[ris]

> One of the reasons I don't like ORMs is that I'm not able to see the underlining query and truly optimize a service.

The vast majority of your queries will not fall into the category of "bottlenecks that need to be optimized" though, and you (and your probably more inexperienced team) will benefit massively from the less error-prone & more extensible nature of ORMs (I never again want to have to deal with an attempt at SQL code reuse that has grown into a string-formatted, quadruple-manifestation, triple-escaped nightmare)

A good ORM will also ease the transition into more manual SQL too, so that you can still retain the benefits of e.g. uniform abstract objects app-side.