Definitely agreed regarding django orm. And moment you decide not to use it or cannot use it because of legacy issues you're in a world of pain. We've developed https://github.com/shosca/django-rest-witchcraft and https://github.com/shosca/django-sorcery as the project was already using django+sqlalchemy and doing everything manually and also had to touch legacy db's (think composite pk's and all kinds of db quirks..)