I totally agree with you on developer productivity. Said another way, to connect technology & finance: early on, when developer cost is much more significant to the company than infrastructure costs, emphasizing developers building the right product is more important than optimizing the infrastructure costs.
Secondly, I am a fan of ORMs. I exclusively use ORMs on CRUD-based actions. The typical first-fix for ORMs I see is to move dashboards, reports, and aggregations to native SQL. Just doing that get you a lot of performance improvements. Recently, for a friend, not associated with Crunchy & not using Crunchy, I helped them lower their cost of database operations from $2500 / month to $500 / month. All I did was find the slowest queries, determine the ORM was running a slow query, and doing an N+1 query , then point them in a direction to fix it. Because their cost of operations were looking at increasing so quickly, they were looking at migrating to a different database, NoSQL, or something else.
Again, appreciate the feedback. Cheers.