Coming from nhibernate now working with sqlalchemy, more so than async the one feature i miss when working with sqlalchemy is futures with multiple result queries, like this https://ayende.com/blog/3979/nhibernate-futures
Definitely agreed regarding django orm. And moment you decide not to use it or cannot use it because of legacy issues you're in a world of pain. We've developed https://github.com/shosca/django-rest-witchcraft and https://github.com/shosca/django-sorcery as the project was already using django+sqlalchemy and doing everything manually and also had to touch legacy db's (think composite pk's and all kinds of db quirks..)
Run that target as part of the test