[karmajunkie]

I think you might be missing the point of tests. Its not "ease of test maintenance" that's driving architecture; its testing that elucidates bad design. The fundamental problem in the rails community is that instead of evolving architecture, we've added tooling to decrease the pain (e.g. guard/spork, zeus/spring, et al) rather than fix the way we write code that makes testing easy (easier?) and (more) painless.