This is quite amusing, as it was one of the biggest complaints I had when coming to an RoR shop from a Java shop (please don't immediately take this to mean that I advocate Java over anything else).

In my Java shop, we used the service pattern. We had our views, our controllers, our models (which were simply meant to hold data), our services, and our data access objects. Services performed the business logic, and data access objects interacted with the database.

This pattern worked extremely well for every application we developed. Entering the RoR world, I quickly found that most developers forget about all the lessons we learned back when we used other languages, and are repeating the quick-and-dirty mistakes we already corrected.