[urbanautomaton]

My preference is to have the base factories set everything that is needed for the generated record to be valid, and nothing more. If your User model validates the presence of the account, then the account association should be set - if not, it shouldn't. Otherwise, FactoryGirl.create(:user) is going to provide you with an unsaved, invalid record, which would certainly be surprising to me if I were using that factory for the first time. If all you want is a consistent set of initial attributes, then define a constant USER_ATTRIBUTES somewhere with a hash of values, and pass that to #new - using factories for this purpose is a bit sledgehammer/walnut.

I agree that excessive association building can get out of hand (and the latest version of FG even allows you to subscribe to factory events just so you can work out what the hell your test suite is building - a sure sign that you've lost the ability to reason about your tests if ever there was one), but completely abstaining from building associations seems to remove more or less all of the attraction of using factories as a fixture replacement in the first place.

All of the above applies only to integration/acceptance tests, though, where factories-as-fixture-replacements are at least arguably justifiable; my recommendation for unit tests is "don't use factories at all."