I stopped using Rails not so much because of the existence of the escape_once method but because of what its introduction in 2006, and its continued use in mainstream Rails methods (until 2010 when Rails 3.0 was released), said about the direction of the project.
What did it say about the direction of the project, in your opinion? I can see how one might conclude that the developers are idiots based on that method, but I have to say that what I get out of Rails vastly outweighs that stupidity.
