Yup, that was my first thought too. But you kind of need to know SQL to really figure out the current API, so maybe moving closer to that isn't a bad idea. In a

Yup, that was my first thought too. But you kind of need to know SQL to really figure out the current API, so maybe moving closer to that isn't a bad idea. In any case, you only need to know the idea of SQL, really, since chainable scopes let you go wild with where().joins().where().where() and you don't have to worry about syntax or aliasing. You can still use find() through 3.1 (so for at least a number of months I'd expect). At that point, they'll offer backwards compatibility via a plugin, so no worries.