I'm "eh" on ORMs, so if there are ORMers out there... one of the things I find hurts SQL and data-model comprehension is the compounded complexity of relationships. Maybe you have authors and books - but more likely your data-model is more complex, maybe your business needs group authors by family and you also track how many copies of books are in libraries. This is still a pretty simple situation but as things get more complicated the utilization of non-materialized views can help simplify expression - but they come at the cost of pushing some of your logic into the DB where normal developers can't see it.

Have people using SQLAlchemy and other ORMs found it helpful to create fake views using the ORM system (i.e. pre-define a commonly used join) so that it can be reused as a simpler black-box unit of code where needed?