The rails core team would tell you NOT to use arel, as it's private API.
The conceptual compression of having activerecord be a database table mapper, entity class, form/input validation, and query builder, it's both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness, depending of the stage of the business. FWIW the ruby community has more suitable alternatives which self serve the kind of abstractions you describe, such as hanami.
The conceptual compression of having activerecord be a database table mapper, entity class, form/input validation, and query builder, it's both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness, depending of the stage of the business. FWIW the ruby community has more suitable alternatives which self serve the kind of abstractions you describe, such as hanami.