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Yes, I also found the Django ORM to be absolutely horrendous. The need for using a serializer was also incredibly offputting and the default behavior of said serializers was almost always unhelpful and in fact caused more work than just crafting a JSON (or XML) object as I would do in Flask. Why some developers prefer these awful abstractions is beyond me.

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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.

The ORM works pretty well as long as you only need to do pretty basic CRUD queries, though I do agree that it gets much worse as your queries get more complex.

Serializers are definitely one of the worst parts of DRF. Anecdotally, I used Pydantic (instead of Marshmallow as the author recommends) to get around this.

I use pydantic for serializers in Django too- and recently started experimenting with Django Ninja https://django-ninja.rest-framework.com/ if you haven't seen it already.

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