On top of that, Rails sometimes seems like it goes out of it's way to make attr_accessible a pain to use. I know more than once on my team someone has spent more than a few minutes trying to figure out why a model wasn't updating before they remembered to add a property to attr_accessible. In one case, we had a (rarely-used) field uneditable for a few weeks due to it not being included on the list.

I really liked wycats proposal of moving this sort of thing to the controller - it's a much more logical place to look, and I do think there's a thing as a too-skinny controller - mapping inputs to model attributes is a perfectly sane thing for the controller to do IMO.