Coming from Rails I think that Django's ORM is too complicated, like almost everything in Django and in Python. However I'm using Python, Ruby and Elixir in different projects and Ecto is much more complicated. It makes me want to write plain SQL as I did in the early 90s.
Actually I'd be OK writing SQL. It's just inconvenient having to decode the results and handle migrations manually. I did plain SQL migrations before ORMs. That's not something I want to be back to.
Django's ORM is pretty complicated under the hood, but I suspect that this is not easily avoidable given the requirements.
I also don't subscribe to the view that Django is too complicated. With other frameworks you end up implementing part of Django, and most of the time that will be worse in every conceivable way.
This. It's not harder, it's different. Takes some getting used to, but then you realize "oh it's pretty much just sql that returns structs" and you instantly hate every other ORM you've used prior.
I'm not surprised about your comment on Ecto. Ecto takes experience and practice, but by the time you finish writing your 5th or 6th application, Ecto will be so natural that you wouldn't want to go back. Especially not to writing vanilla SQL.
The problem with complicate things is that the second application never comes. I've got a customer that's been paying me to write a Phoenix application for the last two years. That's good but I'm not going to use Ecto in one of my own projects. So no Elixir if it touches a database. There are simpler alternatives to Ecto, maybe I'll use one of them but Ruby and ActiveRecord are good almost for everything.
Actually I'd be OK writing SQL. It's just inconvenient having to decode the results and handle migrations manually. I did plain SQL migrations before ORMs. That's not something I want to be back to.