Well what would you prefer? A complete re-architecture of Rails to support SOAs? Declaring head and body renders separately? They did the hard work for ActiveRecord. Most Rails apps still use ActiveRecord and have a relatively straightforward architecture. If you want the same benefit for your SOA architecture, it's not that hard, just build a middleware layer that defers the queries like arel does. Even better, follow the facebook approach, render a page shell and load the content via AJAX. That will ultimately get you the best performance by far, allowing faster response times, piecemeal loading, maximal offloading of processing to the client side, and opens up interesting avenues for caching possibilities.