There is simply nothing better in my opinion.
Possibly SQLalchemy? But yeah, it's quite good, and there are ways you can bypass the Django ORM and write your own SQL in the cases where it's suboptimal. I've only had to do that a very small number of times during the 20-plus years I've been using Django (I was an early adopter, left Zope like a .38 round leaves a gun).
It also helps that I have some decent SQL optimization skills: when I was doing consulting, I triggered the resignations of two client DBAs because they insisted that there was no way to significantly improve a query's performance, then I did it. Stupid hill to die on, all they had to have done was to have said "OK, let's prototype it and see" instead of getting all dogmatic about it. Ego's a dangerous thing in software development.