[matthewmacleod]

Absolutely not the case, in my experience.

Like any advanced tool, it’s possible to shoot yourself in the foot if you don’t use it correctly. But once you know it, it makes simple queries easy, complex queries tolerable, and allows progressively dropping to raw SQL if needed.

I’d go even further and say ActiveRecord (particularly when using Arel for complex query construction) is the single best ORM I’ve ever used. I miss it hard whenever I interact with an SQL database in any other language.