[crdoconnor]

>I'm sure anyone can come up with specific situations where writing SQL is much better than using ORM.

You are supposed to bypass every ORM sometimes. One measure of a good ORM is whether it makes that easy for you or difficult.

Regex queries are definitely one example of a niche SQL query that I would bypass an ORM altogether in order to use.

95% of my SQL queries are not that, though, and for the very standard ones I use an ORM to heavily restrict the amount of code I have to write and maintain type safety.