I've come to realize that there are two camps here: those who appreciate SQL's structure and those who like the left-to-right ORM navigation of relations.

I do have to admit that it is awfully convenient to use a REPL to write a long chain query using an ORM. I do often run into limitations, and knowing that the solution in plain SQL is so simple is very annoying. The idea is to allow convenient composition, but following the structure of SQL rather than parent-children navigation so there aren't paint-yourself-in-a-corner cases.