I used to really dislike django ORMs since I had a background in SQL and thought that ORMs are really constraining and not as flexible as just writing SQLs. However, recently I have come into the realisation that not everyone who programs knows SQL (woah, what a revelation right?), and the django ORM is a really nice tool to fill that gap for them with something they are more familiar with (ie python objects).
If you are using any language other than SQL, then you better have a way to convert SQL data to the appropriate data types of your language and vice versa. And it better be injection-proof and reusable. That's already at least half of an ORM right there.
I think I know SQL fairly well, but I don't see how I could implement things like django admin, form validation, template views etc as elegantly on top of plain SQL.
So I really don't agree with "ORMs are only useful for SQL-noobs".
