eloquent performance still wonky?

it's like it just hates efficency or something.

You're not wrong, it definitely feels like that sometimes when dealing with complex Eloquent relationships. While piling on more indexes is a solid first step, especially for improving database performance tuning, it's rarely the magic bullet for every complex Eloquent scenario. For those 'super deep, nested relationships and joins' where Eloquent performance starts to feel... well, wonky as you put it (and by the way, it's 'efficiency' not 'efficency' – happens to the best of us when we're deep in the code!), you're right to look beyond just indexes. The primary strategy here is mastering eager loading (`with()`) to combat the N+1 problem, using dot notation for nested relationships (e.g., `->with('parent.child.grandchild')`). Beyond that, make judicious use of constrained eager loading when you need to filter related models, like `->with(['users' => function ($query) { $query->where('active', 1); }])`. For more advanced Laravel query optimization, consider using `select()` within your eager loads to only pull the columns you actually need from related tables, which can significantly reduce memory footprint and data transfer. For extremely complex or frequently accessed aggregations, sometimes the most efficient approach is to offload the heavy lifting to the database itself using database views or even materialized views. Laravel can then query these views as if they were simple tables. If all else fails and you hit a genuine performance wall, don't shy away from dropping to raw SQL with the `DB` facade for specific, highly optimized queries; Eloquent is powerful, but it's an ORM, and sometimes direct SQL is simply faster. Lastly, implement query caching for results that don't change frequently, using Laravel's cache facade with appropriate tags for invalidation. Hope this helps your conversions!