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.
Never had any problems with Eloquent relations and querying on them. I find them very powerful.
Yes, they aren't done in a single query format - which should be a problem since it may be faster just to do two simple queries then one complex.
Besides that relations could be eager loaded for when you have number of items in first query and want to load relations to all of them. With eager loading you won't have problems with N + 1 queries.
