> If you're using an ORM, you can use a view but it's kind of awkward
If it's awkward to use a view in an ORM, it's a bad ORM. Your ORM shouldn't care if a relvar is a table or a view. (It obviously might care if it's updatable or not, but updatable views—both automatically updatable and updatable via specific trigger programming—arw a common thing, as are read-only base tables.)
I dunno, I find using relations I'm not supposed to modify pretty odd in an ORM. And YMMV, but I've never seen an updatable view in the wild. I know it's doable, particularly in Postgres, but it seems like something capital-S Surprising to...probably most folks I've ever worked with?
If it's awkward to use a view in an ORM, it's a bad ORM. Your ORM shouldn't care if a relvar is a table or a view. (It obviously might care if it's updatable or not, but updatable views—both automatically updatable and updatable via specific trigger programming—arw a common thing, as are read-only base tables.)