I feel like this misses the real reason the construction presented is awkward. It's not because class methods are hard to refactor, it's because class methods i

I feel like this misses the real reason the construction presented is awkward. It's not because class methods are hard to refactor, it's because class methods in ruby are not static methods. The thing being attempted seems to be to avoid creating a method that doesn't access state, as if this were C++ and state is relatively expensive. A class method in ruby is not a static method. It is an instance method on the class. It sounds like nitpicking, but the distinction is real. You call #new on a class because the class is The Thing that makes objects, not an awkward pseudo-global scope. Class methods should thus be things for which the class is the subject.