I think we indeed have a muddy definition of seed that doesn’t actually fit the original strict view. Which makes it difficult to rely on it for something like “run before tests”. In HEY, we ended up using seeds for populating basic demo accounts, rather than the strict idea of just populating records you need to bootstrap the system. It would suck if these were run automatically before every test suite, because it would make the tests a lot slower, and for now gain.
But even without reconciling the stretch of the word seed, and the usage of the feature, I think we could get half the way by having a clear path in test_helper.rb to setup whether seeds should be loaded or not. It can start commented out, but make it obvious how you do get seeds loaded before every test run.