I still feel that RedBeanPHP (http://redbeanphp.com) has found the right balance between direct object manipulation and SQL. I find that abstracting away SQL too much gives more headaches than it's worth — SQL is a valuable skill anyway, and often diving into SQL is much faster and easier than diving into abstraction magic.
I love redbean, it saved my butt once, but it gets lots of it's power from doing things "the PHP way", it makes linting and editor/ide autocompletion impossible, there is no one place you can look to find the part of the database schema relevant to your application, you can't just go read a models.php file and get a birds eye view of the database structure that matters and all...
It's basically the opposite of "pythonic". I can't imagine something like redbean written in a language like Python, and maybe it's for the best :)
Another +1 for redbean. Haven't tried v4 with the namespace support yet, and I have a feeling I will not like it as much as earlier releases, but will probably end up needing to use it on newer projects.
The dev mode approach of 'just do stuff and I'll modify the tables' has scared off many people I've showed it to, but I love the approach - sort of a moderate 'nosql' approach without giving up structured tables for more complex queries later.
