[stasa]

Hydration is not a big problem. However, Dapper does much more than that: it handles multi-mapping (eg mapping users and posts from a single query), query parameterization etc. Surely, you can do it all ad hoc, but Dapper provides very convenient set of primitives out of the box.

[aikah]

> it handles multi-mapping (eg mapping users and posts from a single query)

You can achieve all that with JSON support in SQL, which most RDBMS have. You can then de-serialize JSON rows into Python objects. No need for an ORM.