I'm starting a fresh ASP.NET Core Web API project and trying to decide between Dapper and EF Core for data access. I've heard EF Core is the "standard" choice, but Dapper keeps coming up in performance discussions.

What are the real trade-offs here? I'm not looking for a generic "EF is ORM, Dapper is micro-ORM" explanation — I want to know how they behave under load, how much boilerplate each requires for a typical CRUD API, and whether Dapper's lack of change tracking will bite me later.

• Setup complexity: How hard is it to wire Dapper into the built-in DI container compared to EF Core's migrations and DbContext?
• Query flexibility: If I need raw SQL for a reporting endpoint, does Dapper make that trivial while EF Core forces me into raw SQL strings anyway?
• Maintenance: Will my team struggle with Dapper's manual mapping, or is EF Core's convention-over-configuration actually a net win?

Curious what people are using in production right now for medium-scale APIs. Any war stories welcome.