I used to dislike it myself, and in the context of building within a framework like Rails, I'll defer to an ORM. But my appreciation for SQL deepened as I became a more experienced programmer and began valuing explicitness in code. The reason why I do most data work in Python is because most of my work is exploratory, and I need a language that is well-suited for gluing together services and non-analysis-specific functions. But when it comes to doing work in which time and consistency and portability is Key, SQL is my choice for structured data.