> I always get the feeling that people love ORMs because they don't want to learn SQL.

I suspect that's the problem. It's neither my feeling or my experience.

Every platform/language/OS/chip I know has annoyingly apparent problems. In my experience high-self-conidence-low-self-awareness folks are too keen to drop-level and 'make it right'. And love feeling how smart they are ('everyone who disagrees is obviously not as smart!) Too often 'smart-guys' cost more, long term. And I'm not ragging on you. That was me in my 20s. Embarrassingly.

hehe, I'm in my 50's and have been doing this for >25 years. I still don't know where that line is

Agree, at least for me, I don't discovered the sqlsuperpowers till I got inside it... I would love to see some of this pretty clever orm migrations applied on a busy potgresql server.. with a bit of concurrency... :)