It becomes more and more difficult to maintain ORM code and its usages in CritiqueBrainz. Some things are hard to keep track of either because of complexity or just because of their implicit nature. As a consequence, a lot of database code just became a spaghetti. Code that defines actual queries is not contained within one package but spread all over the place (views, templates).

In AcousticBrainz server, for example, we just have functions with raw SQL queries. I feel like they are much easier to work with. AcousticBrainz uses just SQLAlchemy Core, not ORM.

What I suggest to do then is to replicate setup that is done in AcousticBrainz. It might be a bit difficult to do, but I feel like that's something that has to be done to simplify further development.