[Jeff_Dickey]

I agree. I'd go so far as to call the non-"Classic" school the "OO Experienced" school — people who've had copious experience in SOLID OO development in Ruby and/or other languages, who are generally horrified by many aspects of The Rails Way, but find several of the tools and components useful. The apps developed by this school generally transition fairly quickly from The Rails Way apps, to apps that use Rails, to apps that use several components that are also used by Rails but with increasingly strict separation between the AR persistence/validation/nothing else layer and the domain model. The farther along that arc an app progresses, the more survivable it generally becomes for the team and the more flexible (and profitable) a tool for the organisation.

The Rails Way is fine for a prototype, or for an app that is so well-understood that the team know from the beginning will have sharply limited change in certain very-well-known areas. It's safe to say that the vast majority of the apps I've seen in my career do not fall into that category.