I was referring to the string composition [0] of psycopg2, a library which also takes care of converting SQL results to the correct Python data type. IMO that meets the criteria for an "abstraction above text" that GP was asking for.
But yes, SQLAlchemy Core is far more full-featured and gives you more than just a few primitives to work with. It also has a lot of library-specific constructs and is much closer to a full-fledged "ORM" than a query builder; what you're writing is not exactly SQL and is yet another dialect to learn.
