A couple of years ago, no objections were voiced to a proposed patch of ActionController that would allow controllers to have methods with the same names as Object's methods (currently, ActionController::Base.hidden_actions, as called by action_methods, prevents this).
Such a change is of interest to me since I just blew some time figuring out why rails wasn't finding a 'clone' method in one of my controllers. It would be nice to spare others the same.
The 2005 discussion starts at http://lists.rubyonrails.org/pipermail/rails/2005-March/003779.html, and a patch is proposed at http://lists.rubyonrails.org/pipermail/rails/2005-March/003786.html