[rglullis]

Django's ORM gets a lot of flak, but I don't remember the last time I had complex queries that I could not do with it.

You still need to understand a minimum of SQL and databases, and usually those that complain about the ORM are the ones that expect it to be a "sufficiently advanced compiler", but it has matured so much that nowadays the developers consider a *bug* every time the answer to How do I do this query X? involves something along the lines of use .extra or raw sql.

[RussianCow]

This is true, though to be fair to the critics, the syntax through which you express these complex queries is often clunky and unintuitive. For example, I need to re-read the documentation every time I use the annotation API because it's generally not obvious how to use it, and I've run into a few edge cases where you need extra code/syntax just to deal with its nuances and ambiguities.

Even though Django has come a long way, I greatly prefer ORMs like SQLAlchemy and Ecto that map more closely to the SQL query I'm trying to write.