For what it's worth, I completely agree with the "crappy alias" thing, and wrote a lot about this topic back when I was working on Rails full time (example: http://yehudakatz.com/2009/03/06/alias_method_chain-in-model...).

Ruby eventually added `prepend`, which I demonstrated upthread, and is a genuinely generic, in-language solution to the problem you're talking about.

I dug up my original proposal from 2009, which eventually landed in Ruby 2.0: http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-core/...