While I do enjoy the Django ORM, for many queries SQL is just better. It's almost as if it was designed for querying database.

Once you hit a certain level of complexity in your queries, you're better of with SQL. It's not that you can't do the query in the ORMs, but you're then looking at learning their special query language and those are never better nor easier to understand than just SQL. Those ORM query languages certainly aren't transferable across ORMs, but SQL frequently is. If you can query MariaDB with SQL, you can query SQLServer and PostgreSQL. The same can't be said for e.g. Django vs. Hibernate.

For the "give me all the entries, with this one property" ORMs a much quicker and easier to work with. Once you start needing to use subselect, multiple joins, weird ranges or constructing object with data from across tables, I'd rather just write the SQL myself.

I write SQL every day, but I cannot get onboard with liking the language. Yes, it is incredible that the language has had such staying power. No, it is not great that such a flawed design has persisted.

I enjoy this article[0] about some of the persistent warts which will seemingly never change.

[0]https://www.geldata.com/blog/we-can-do-better-than-sql