You are conflating Ruby with RoR. You start by saying "I think it is necessary hygiene for Ruby." but then go on to say "RoR is very error-prone and a lot of work by comparison" and "So many bits and pieces need to be glued together, from attr_accessible through to update params slicing..." -- that's Rails you're talking about. And I don't blame you for that. As a long-time Ruby developer, I can say with no qualms that Rails is a not a very good web framework, way too buggy and full of magic. But please don't conflate that with Ruby. Ruby with Sinatra is a hell of a lot cleaner and it's much easier to structure your code well.