Well in my particular case it's a read-only app (there are no writes at all from the app itself so no need to worry about cache invalidation) so a caching ORM that can be a drop-in replacement would've been a huge win for less than one hour of dev time, and I could've done it in Python without any issues.
With this obsolete language the only way is to change pretty much all the app to do app-layer caching and that would've cost 20x times that, so we're not going to do it.
With this obsolete language the only way is to change pretty much all the app to do app-layer caching and that would've cost 20x times that, so we're not going to do it.