Seriously, though, how would you improve the solution? What would decrease the likelihood of serving the wrong asset or no asset at all? I'm sure there are other interesting solutions to this problem, but are they as complete and in some measurable way better?
Disclaimer: I work with Jared and enjoy the benefit of the solution as described.
You've missed the point. 90% of Rails websites behave badly every time they're deployed, and the developers don't even realize it. I included our build scripts in the post to illustrate how simple it is to fix the problem. The important thing is that people reliably version their asset URIs, not what tools they use to do it.
