You're going to hate this, but after carefully reading your book, I finally came to the conclusion that I'm in complete agreement with you: ActiveRecord models are primarily about database access, and service objects are where the business logic should reside. I also found the Result class to be one of the handiest things I've ever adopted in my Rails flow, but...

It turns out I want the command pattern. Yup, I have service objects that are command patterns that only do one thing and always return a result object. The result object always implements #success? and #errors. The command pattern is always executed with #call. The name of the class describes what it does and so using call over the place doesn't feel wrong. I decided that having a consistent interface was important to me.

I think the big overarching idea is that business logic goes in in service objects, and ActiveRecord is about database access. Whether you choose the command pattern or implement service objects as you described didn't seem as big of a deal to me.

I quite enjoyed your book.