Earlier quoted context omitted.
What could be those ORM features that you're missing? I've been working with Laravel 4 since before it had documentation when I had to go through all of the code to understand how it works and I know that besides what is described in documentation - there's a number of features that are available, but not listed.
Joining and querying efficiently on relations is probably the most obvious omission.
http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/eloquent#relationships
http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/eloquent#querying-relations
> EDIT and this for making them effective