I've just created a pull request to finally make ActiveResource correctly handle validation errors returned from ActionController::Responder's default JSON handling code. The code also handles the format produced by pre-3.2 Responders *and* the format previously expected by ActiveResource, so it shouldn't break in any application that was working before.
https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/4881
Would appreciate any feedback - it would be nice for the framework to actually work with its own API endpoints...
Thanks,
--Matt Jones