It's funny you bring this up, because just yesterday I was using HTTParty and was getting strange errors when I was doing POSTs / PUT queries (basically the REST API I was using was giving me 500s and I didn't know why). After looking at your source, I then immediately realized I had to use the :body param instead of the :query param to pass in www-urlencoded values. Whether that reflects on the consistency or documentation of the API is another matter, but it just proves your point about the importance of being able to grok code.