> So you have the choice of abandoning the ORM in performance-sensitive paths and inserting raw SQL (making the code ugly) or living with poor performance.

Most people ask themselves the same question and don't care much about performance. I'm glad you choose performance over code aesthetic. Code aesthetic should only come second to how the system performs. As for the ORM, it has it's downfalls. I've never heard of the N+1 query problem in the plain SQL world. It's a problem brought forth by ORM, because it's just stupid to even think about N+1 when you're trying to accomplish as much as you can in 1 query.