I agree static analysis can help. Specifically for changing column names it just doesnt really happen that often in most projects I worked on...so I never really thought it to be a big deal.
Then you're lucky. I specialize in refactoring and reorganizing extremely messy and large / complex applications. And Rails is my fucking nightmare. Especially when untangling ActiveRecord callbacks, fat controllers, convention over configuration, magic method, and database changes.
I would give a kidney to have static compilation in rails when refactoring.
