Firmly agree. I wish that ORMs provided two interfaces above raw SQL: a syntactically guaranteed-to-hit-indexes set of functions, and a do-anything set (e.g. MyModel.objects.unrestricted.filter(…)) that you could lint for and audit. An unsung benefit of ORMs is that they have code-level awareness of what queries are likely to be fast, since indexes are usually defined in the ORM. I wish they took more advantage of that.