Ruby shines because it is a terse/expressive language that doesn't need heavy use of patterns, so you can grok a lot of logic at a glance. You want a hash? Write it inline, you don't need a lazy-loaded memoized function.

The original was the easiest to understand, and the refactored versions didn't expose much that would benefit from testing or code reuse. This feels over-engineered to me.

And not to nitpick, but since when is class << self an ugly form? It makes perfect sense if all methods will be class methods.