Activerecord is indeed a major trade-off with rails. For heterogeneous projects, it can be frustrating that rails tends to favour validations, constraints and f

Activerecord is indeed a major trade-off with rails. For heterogeneous projects, it can be frustrating that rails tends to favour validations, constraints and foreign key relationships in the ruby model files. Eg. You have a dot.net service that needs to write some data to the database, and doing it via REST endpoints on your rails app is really slow compared to accessing the database directly. But now you don't have any constraints on your relationships, and it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Extra sad, since you do have some constraints (belongs_to etc) - they're just not communicated to your database. I have some legacy rails projects I maintain, and my job would've been easier if previous developers followed the rails way more closely - and whenever I manage to refractor my way back, code becomes shorter, clearer, more efficient and less error prone. Things like only half of a relationship being defined, and joins being hand-rolled in one direction is a "favorite"...