I freaking love SQLAlchemy. Those quirks once let me build a sane API on top of a legacy database (ported from Visual FoxPro hourly using a program I also wrote for the task). Some of the fields were values in an XML doc shoved into a DB column because the original programmer thought that was a good idea at the time. I wrote indexes and virtual columns that let other devs query those fields just like everything else.

It has its edge cases, but Alchemy is the greatest thing in the world when you need its exact features.

But yes, I’ve used that line plenty of times: “we’re not in the X-writing business”. I mean, sometimes you can’t help it, but those should be exceedingly rare cases.