I think the most important part is to create your database schema through your ORM. I used to do that ages ago with Ruby on Rails, and that worked very well. We still had our complex reporting queries in SQL, and that was no problem. The point is that if you use an ORM, your database needs to be optimised for that ORM. Bolting an ORM onto an existing database is a recipe for disaster.
I learned to use the Django ORM in depth, but there were some things it couldn't do at the time (it may have improved). Extra conditions on joins. Subqueries, conditional aggregates (it does those now). Once you get to a certain level of complexity you can shoehorn the query into the ORM,but I am not sure it makes sense. The next developer is more likely to know SQL well than the Djnago ORM.
