I can&#x27;t think of an orm that can&#x27;t handle joins.  I can think of way that relatively inexperienced devs might use an orm in a day that doesn&#x27;t take proper advantage of it though (seen it).  I don&#x27;t see this as a reason to avoid an orm of course.  In rails it&#x27;s pretty trivial to load associations most of the time.<p>There are also some queries that I think are best handled by find by sql oreven just raw sql.  Sometimes this is performance othertimes it&#x27;s for clarity.<p>Overall if you use an form properly I think it can save time and improve clarity.