zzzeek - can I take this chance to praise your work on SqlAlchemy. People say there's not enough thanks given to open source developers... here's thanks to you. It's the work of a craftsman.
Joking aside, SwlAlchemy is very impressive software, and zzzeek deserves all this praise and more. Every time that there's one of these anti-ORM articles I feel like SqlAlchemy pre-emtively addressed all the substantive criticisms in its flexible, well layered, design.
(And in the interests of fairness, Django's ORM is also very good at making simple things simple).
I am a huge fan of the custom column types -- they have allowed me to have code that works against SQLite as well as a production databases with ease!
I wish more people aspired to be like him, because you know there's no more authoritative answer when you run into a Stack Exchange post and he's offering up his assistance.