[btown]

My Chaotic Good take on this: one could implement a qs.auto_fetch_deferred() that emits model instances with weak back-references to a WeakSet of all instances emitted, and on a deferred get on ANY instance, it prefetches that attribute onto ALL of the instances... so that it doesn't just complain, but actually fixes your 1+N issue. But here lies absolute madness...

[Suor]

Actually there is such thing already https://pypi.org/project/django-auto-prefetch/ Not a monkey patch though, so will only work on the models you inherit from this.

[readertime]

I agree; Django (and many ORMs) have taken the opinion that if you load N instances of a model, and then you load a related field on 1 of them, you likely only want the 1 related field. If however they assumed that loading a related field implies you likely want all related fields, perhaps there’d be fewer instances of foot-gunning.