"ORMs generally can't even express what you want, or can only do so in incredibly inefficient ways, so you end up dropping down to SQL anyways"
on the project/team i work on, this statement is false. If it's true for some other team, maybe they are "doing it wrong". I'm sure it depends on one's particular ORM implementation, and whether it is any good, and what it's design goals are.
What ORM are you using? I've never seen or heard of one that people didn't have to drop down to sql with (or a pseudo SQL language that is converted directly to SQL).
a custom one actually, and it does have tons of warts and i'd rather be using datomic, but it does an exceptional job of expressing high level queries that expand into a mess of nested SQL expressions.
on the project/team i work on, this statement is false. If it's true for some other team, maybe they are "doing it wrong". I'm sure it depends on one's particular ORM implementation, and whether it is any good, and what it's design goals are.