I'm running a sales reporting and payroll software written in Django, and it's more like 10% of views benefit from ORM and for 90% views ORM is hindrance and a serious performance hit.
I see ORM vs relational style as a development mindset issue. We have moved using SQLAlchemy Core (not the ORM part) and the difference in development style is stunning: now it's quite easy and more importantly FUN to write performant queries, whereas when we were using Django ORM, it was very easy to write non-performant code and tedious to make it fast.
One could pose a question that if you are not doing aggregation, why have SQL/relational database at all.
I know, there are several valid reasons to use SQL databases as key-value storages: they are likely more robust than NoSQL dbs, there are API wrappers for most of languages, etc.
But for many interesting problem domains reporting and data aggregation is raison d'être for software and that's why I would like to see more solutions in the spirit of SQLAlchemy Core that make it easier to restructure complex queries as a reusable pieces of code, but do not force to you to step into the world of ORMs.
I see ORM vs relational style as a development mindset issue. We have moved using SQLAlchemy Core (not the ORM part) and the difference in development style is stunning: now it's quite easy and more importantly FUN to write performant queries, whereas when we were using Django ORM, it was very easy to write non-performant code and tedious to make it fast.