I like query builders but if everything were done with query builders there'd still be an awful lot of DRY pertaining to business logic that needs to go somewhere. Maybe you replace the ORM with some sort of 'results act as <something>' abstraction, but things like that often work out much better with consistent scaffolding of some sort, which is mostly what successful ORMs seem to be.

This is why I love Sqlalchemy. We use it as half orm, half query builder and it’s pretty great.