[manuelabeledo]

It sounds to me that you saying that SQL is hard because you’d rather learn the intricacies of an ORM.

Also, this whole point predicates upon the assumption that ORMs are infallible when translating queries into SQL, which most definitely are not.

[luckylion]

No, I'm saying if you want to alter SQL queries programmatically, you'll either do some quick hacks with regexps that you'll regret, or you need to build something to do that, and that will look suspiciously like a query builder.

[manuelabeledo]

I’m having a hard time trying to understand exactly what you want to do, that cannot be done with SQL. Any concrete examples?

I personally rely on views to reuse base queries and then add filters on top of them.