You're on the right side of the bell-curve meme my friend, but there are a lot more people in the thick-framework camp who spend their days getting lost in the complexity of ORMs and related tech...
In this particular case, it might not be worth to trade speed of having to think about SQL for performance (today or tomorrow). Maybe you're building something that will just be used by 2-3 people, so 1+N isn't really a issue.
Or whatever, the conclusion as always is: it depends.