Ah, it's a design element. I actually remember looking at that area and noticing the stitching and that the border looked nice, but to be honest my brain only saw a Levi's tag hanging there (it didn't look like a date). Also, there is no year. Anyway, mea culpa, I'll look harder next time.

Sure, it's 81 lines shorter, but I don't know what's going on there, either. Its one thing to express a method in an elegant fashion, but an entirely different thing to hide it off someplace, which is how I read what is happening here. I'm guessing there are some instance variables available afterwards? Plus, it's an additional dependency.

And yeah, I read the title "Why You Shouldn't Use Rails' Scaffolded Controllers" and "...the state of the art has moved on" to mean that what you were talking about was supposed to be better.