This is where I was before I picked up Rails. What I realised was that while I preferred SQL in general, what I actually cared about was the ability to really go to town on the 5% of queries that actually needed attention, and the other 95% were boilerplate and entirely unsurprising. Letting the framework make those ones just go away under a layer of syntax I didn't even have to specify, but that got automagicked up from the database schema, was a breath of fresh air.