SqlAlchemy: ORM vs. Core expression language

I'm in the process of writing a forum-like discussion component for a larger web application, and I am debating on whether or not I should use the full sqlalchemy ORM, or just the expression language. Using the expression language(the underlying part of sqlalchemy which the ORM is built upon), I planned to take a general table data gateway approach (http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/tableDataGateway.html), creating simple and light-weight data-access-objects (e.g. UserGate, TopicGate, PostGate, etc) that will serve as the data-access layer.

The expression language protects against injection attacks, handles connection pooling, and also provides a nice way of generating the sql queries (e.g. usergate.select(whereclause=(usergate.c.id == userid)).execute() ). However, this approach will certainly necessitate more boilerplate code; I am wondering if this is acceptable since it will use much less internal function calls than the ORM.

I'd greatly appreciate some feedback, especially from people who have used sqlalchemy core to implement a custom data-access layer.

I read this article, but didn't get that much information from it tbh: http://stackful-dev.com/discovering-sqlalchemy-core-the-relational-nosql-api-for-python.html