> It's more about the full IO stack than just making Python faster.

Does it mean that your db adapter isn't necessarily DBAPI (PEP-249) compliant? That is, it could be that DBAPI exception hierarchy isn't respected, so that middlewares that expect to work across the stack and catch all DB-related issues, may not work if the underlying DB access stack is using your drivers?

> but F() is still stringly-typed. Room for improvement there.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure F() isn't needed. You can look at how sqlalchemy implements combinator-style API around field attributes:

    import sqlalchemy as sa
    from sqlalchemy.orm import DeclarativeBase


    class Base(sa.orm.DeclarativeBase):
        pass

    class Stats(Base):
        __tablename__ = "stats"

        id = sa.Column(sa.Integer, primary_key=True)
        views = sa.Column(sa.Integer, nullable=False)

    print(Stats.views + 1)

The expression `Stats.views + 1` is self-contained, and can be re-used across queries. `Stats.views` is a smart object (https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/21/orm/internals.html#sqlalch...) with overloaded operators that make it re-usable in different contexts, such as result getters and query builders.