Kevin Clark recently posted an interesting article titled "Things You Shouldn't be Doing in Rails."  Some of the suggestions were sorely needed (especially the one about asking good questions on the Rails-talk mailing list), but I thought a few of them were either underdeveloped or plain wrong:

• Scaffolding: I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently, and I believe that the chorus of "don't use the scaffolding" is missing the point.  Even if newbies don't use the scaffolding in their production code, they will use it to learn The Rails Way.  In the absence of well-developed online docs, most users are going to do it the way the scaffold did it -- for better or worse.  I'll pronounce myself fully guilty here (but on the road to recovery).  The payoff from a few hours of cleanup on the scaffold generation code to make it generate clean, idiomatic code is that more people see it done the right way.  Surely that's worth the time taken to accept a few (already made) patches?
  
• Namespaced Controllers: Kevin is on the right track here -- this is one of the first things I wanted to do with my first application.  There's a flawed assumption behind all of this that wasn't mentioned: that you need different controllers for administrators and normal users.  Even though it's a pretty clear violation of the DRY principle, no one seems to mention this when they're talking about this issue.

I'll leave the rest of his points as-is, since they are in fact good suggestions.  It seems that most readers either didn't like the author's tone, or felt that he was "scaring" recent / potential converts away from the Church of Rails.  Maybe that's true, but I think the original idea (presenting a list of deprecated idioms and features in Rails) is certainly a good one.  One commenter proposed a site for that purpose; now that's an idea I could get behind.