It's not that bad, we are not using ember-data because it's not yet suitable for us (no special handling for significant HTTP errors), but instead we use jQuery

It's not that bad, we are not using ember-data because it's not yet suitable for us (no special handling for significant HTTP errors), but instead we use jQuery callbacks. I think ember-data will be great later on, providing all the Active-Record-like magic, but you really can get along well without it. IIRC Discourse does not use it, either, but has its own model base classes.