EAV is not for everyone. You have to have a data set for which each entity can have values defined for some of, but not all of a large set of attributes. It’s a bit like sparse matrices, actually.

And, yes, you want your tools and application to abstract away some of the messiness involved in something as simple as “load/save this object from the database,” otherwise you’ll end up with a much larger amount of code for such a simple operation. I’ve seen it done in a Django app, and it’s not bad to work with once those abstractions are in place.