My guess is that you haven't actually had to deal with any large rails applications, or that the one you are dealing with is the first one you've dealt with.

My guess is that you haven't actually had to deal with any large rails applications, or that the one you are dealing with is the first one you've dealt with. The abstractions Rails uses are fine for a relatively small app (up to 10 models). Beyond that is where the complexity mushrooms and the framework starts dragging down the project. Solnik's points about create() are very subtle. Think about coercion, validation, and all the potentially invalid or confusing states an app can end up in. The approach Rails takes with ActiveRecord is fine for a small project, and often benefits consultants who leverage the boilerplate to show superb progress after one month of development, but it fails in the real world. To be fair to Rails, most approaches to input validation and the creation of multiple levels of nested objects are implemented poorly. Solnik's point is just that Rails serves up a lot of these flawed approaches into one toolkit, and so the resulting ecosystem is plagued by the sum of all the flaws, and the core team is not really seeing the big picture about how to improve the overall state of the ecosystem (why would they, they are getting paid a lot from the Rails status quo). DataMapper was superior to ActiveRecord. When Merb got merged into Rails, I was certian DM would be the ORM of choice for new projects, but when it wasn't I personally stopped using Rails on new projects. Sinatra + DataMapper is such a superior approach to full-boat Rails too, fwiw. How many thousands of developer hours are spent upgrading to the latest Rails every couple of years for no benefit. How many useful gems are nearly obsoleted, etc. Rails has had the worst kind of cargo cult success. Most of the gems are weekend projects that lead to a blog post and a bunch of speaking engagements for the writer, and then get left to wither after the community has naively embraced them. This is not the case for all, but it happens way too often. There are also many, many subtle bugs that are introduced by ActiveSupport. I've personally wasted at least two weeks of time dealing with them over the past 5 years. Ruby is a great language, but I'm glad someone as talented as Solnik is branching out.