> i don't have to look at the database to know which properties a model has

I just pop open db/schema.rb and then search for where the users table schema is described. This .rb file is automatically generated. In production systems, I actually configure it to use db/schema.sql which stores the SQL schema instead of the Ruby schema, since my production database has indexes that Rail's migrations can't describe directly.

Or even more directly:

  psql -c '\d users'

Which I typically run from vim:

  :!psql -c '\d users'

And that just prints out the description of the table for me.

I don't know, but i think that looking at models/yourmodel.py is easier. But well, this is me (and also, i came from a hibernate/spring background).

And for 'newbies', it's more intuitive to look for a class model than to look for sql schema.