[sneak]

I know SQL and I like ORMs. For most simple CRUD, an ORM is fine. I don’t understand how they are “as much a hindrance as a help”; using an ORM only adds functionality, it cannot prevent you from using SQL against the data source in the same manner you would if you weren’t using an ORM.

It’s really just syntactic sugar for the subset of very basic queries that are easily expressed in the ORM. If other parts of your codebase are expecting ORM objects, it’s maybe two lines of code to re-wrap your SQL-fetched PK values back into ORM ducks.