I couldn't agree more. ORMs might be an ok choice to get started quickly and to maintain a consistent way of working across teams, but over time they very frequently become a bottleneck. Having a handwritten, optimized SQL with specific joins and subqueries, tailored to the exact problem - or even better yet, a pre-planned query or postgres function is often orders of magnitudes more efficient and can make a substantial difference in terms of response times and running costs for your db servers.