For REST APIs, writing the database queries are easy enough; and, often less painful than trying to figure out an API. I don't know of any Rails app that hasn't

For REST APIs, writing the database queries are easy enough; and, often less painful than trying to figure out an API. I don't know of any Rails app that hasn't required some amount of custom queries. When you consider that the most coupled endpoints just require a few joins/group by's/nested function queries, writing the rest of the queries takes only as long as it takes you to type a few sentences. You could easily have a Database type which offers a few methods (e.g. Do(), Query(), &Result) and export a map of these for each resource. Keeping track and reasoning about these is easy if you clean up and break up your monolithic app into packages.