> ActiveRecord beats this, since the code ends up more readable

It's subjective and I tend to disagree. Especially for very simple and very complex queries.

Also, unless you are a following a "code-first" approach and doing all your schema migrations through the ORM, you have to redefine your tables, columns and relationships a second time and keep them up-to-date with every change, which is a huge hassle.

Obviously if your app is a simple CRUD app, might be simpler to just use Rails/Django/Symfony with an ORM and embrace the code-first approach.