I actually like the Django ORM. Something that I learned working with Django 8+ years is that to use its ORM effectively, you have to play Django's game. Sometimes just by denormalizing a few fields will make some queries/relationships way easier.
At work we have a marketplace engine and a digital wallet/financial app built entirely with Django (100k+ loc) and we don't have a single raw SQL query, everything is done with the Django ORM.
At work we have a marketplace engine and a digital wallet/financial app built entirely with Django (100k+ loc) and we don't have a single raw SQL query, everything is done with the Django ORM.