[hvis]

> is ActiveRecord much maligned?

Well, take the numerous articles extolling the virtues of Sequel, or DataMapper, or, related to the current discussion, Ecto itself. Like how expressive this stuff is. And how ActiveRecord creates a too huge API surface on models, and that that leads to bad design, etcetera. Now to mention the callbacks, which are admittedly problematic.

But then I try those aforementioned libs and see sharp corners like terrible argument validations (in case of Sequel) which lead to silently failing code, or actual hard limitations on what I can ask Ecto to do without resorting to meta-programming.

> I also haven't ever found a good replacement for AR migrations

IME, both Sequel and Ecto migrations are fairly serviceable. But neither provides the schema dumping feature that AR has. Which is pretty handy.