Maybe this is a failure of imagination on my part, but won't most people be using ORMs? Again, talking about the use case of the average application that's light enough to get away with SQLite, it doesn't seem like you would need to be hand writing queries.
In my experience ORMs add a layer of complexity, instead of removing one. It's nice to e.g. have a "Pythonic" interface in Python, but when working close to the data I far prefer to write a concise, clear query instead of trying to remember some ORM syntax or what they're calling VARCHARS in this particular ORM, or how they're representing JOINS, or if the condition will be on the ON clause or the WHERE clause, or how they're representing GROUP BY, etc etc.
Two features I enjoy in ActiveRecord and other ORMs, and why I would consider them a good standard practice for most things that aren't "toy" projects.
1. Easy chainability. In ActiveRecord you can have scopes like `User#older_than_65` and `User.lives_in_utah` and easily chain them: `User.older_than_65.lives_in_utah` which is occasionally very useful and way more sane than dynamically building up SQL queries "by hand."
2. Standardization. Maintenance and ongoing development (usually the biggest part of the software lifecycle) tend to get absolutely insane when you have N different coders doing things N different ways. I don't love everything ActiveRecord does, but it's generally quite sane and you can drop a new coder into a standard Rails project and they can understand it quickly. On a large team/codebase that can equate to many thousands or even millions of dollars worth of productivity.
I far prefer to write a concise, clear query instead
of trying to remember some ORM syntax
100% agree.
ActiveRecord strikes a good balance here IMO. An explicit goal of ActiveRecord is to make it painless to use "raw" SQL when desired.
On non-toy projects, I think a policy of "use the ORM by default, and use raw SQL for the other N% of the time when it makes sense" is very very sane.
ORMs integrate poorly in many languages, and perform strictly worse than hand-written SQL.
If you're just using the database for object persistence, which is common, it doesn't matter all too much. But that's not really the scenario we're discussing here, since the data is by the original problem statement, immutable.
