I work with devs that have over a decade of Django experience. We use the ORM because it's just ridiculously easier to write queries on it and because SQL is impossible to compose without substantial problems.
90% of the code we write is CRUD and API endpoints. There's no reason to write SQL by hand except for the complex aggregations that comprise 5% of our queries, with luck.
Would you mind providing an example of what you mean?
- A good module system
- View-like variables
- Scoped singletons (related to the module system)
- First class functions
- First class symbols (that can be used as object names)
- Composable queries (related to the view-like variables and first class symbols)
If I wasn't on vacation I would have a few more fresh on memory. Different ones each day.
SQL lacks some power on negative and consolidated joins, forcing one to write more complex queries than necessary. It is this way for good reasons, because those are exactly the kinds of joins that indexes help you least and that most hinder parallelism, so they should be avoided if possible. On my experience, it's not a large drawback, but YMMV.