Well said. I bitterly hated sqlalchemy because many times I knew perfectly well how to write a query in plain sql but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to write the same query using the sqlalchemy language.
Not that a little detail like that would stop someone from complaining about something that they don't put in the effort to learn.
I'm all for SQL, but if the project's set in its ORM then it doesn't make sense to do ORM.raw(...) or whatever out of preference alone.