Thoughts
I think the issue with Rails (and its or Ruby's philosophy in general) is that you end up with decisions like `.count` / `.size` / `.length`
Having all of them, so that whatever you type works: good.
All of them having slightly different implementations and performance implications: bad.
It's easy in this example to say, "oh they should just all alias eachother" but that's not the real issue. The issue is that when you're in the business of creating shorthands and aliases, and you have two different, similar, operations, they both get shorthands that don't communicate the differences.
I think if you want to be lax in using the interface, you have to be extraordinarily disciplined when creating the interface, or be satisfied with undisciplined programs, which is what most of the Ruby community does.