I don't know about the django ORM, however for some other modern ORM's batch operations and statement reordering are one of the top ORM benefits. If you are developing a set of API's that you have no idea how they'll be consumed, the combination of declarative transactions and heuristically optimized ORM based reordered statements + batch updates gives you easy to understand code, proper transaction semantics and really good performance. Without the ORM + declarative transactions you may end up writing ugly apis that pass transactions or connections around and you'll end up having a major task of optimizing the database interactions. Learn your tool, use it for the right use cases and you'll be happy. Putting your left shoe on the right foot will always feel wrong.