The title suggests that you would be better with no ORM, just SQL. I have not been coding for years - but still remember why ORMs came into being - before them there was lots and lots of repetitive code with the query preparation and execution with long ugly constant strings and string manipulation. With ORMs (and query builders) it all became much more compact (and looking better without the uppercase SQL). As every programming abstraction it is not perfect and you still probably need to learn SQL if you use ORM - so you need to learn both.
