[phillmv]

>Basically, your data-persistence objects (ActiveRecord models) become more composable because they do fewer things and rely less on associated objects being present to work properly.

I agree with this entirely, and elsewhere in this thread have said so, and I'm not advocating fat models.

I'm more questioning the precise way in which you've chosen to perform your refactoring. To me, that-method-in-partcular seems like a code smell, and I've not been convinced by your blog post compared to the alternate methods I've suggested in my comment. Does that make sense?