Same: I was put off by keeping track of models in triplicate, and the lack of automatic migrations. These are considered features, vice bugs; it's not for me.
I tried diesel about 5 years ago. I needed to do relationships where the foreign key lived on the other side of the relationship from what diesel wanted. IIRC diesel only supported the key on a specific side, I think it was a M:1 relationship. Diesel docs said this was unsupported. I was still learning traits at the time but navigating how to implement this in diesel was beyond me. I used sqlx and moved on.
