I too am a long term Rails developer and rarely used scaffolding, mostly because the applications I was working on were all very custom. That said scaffolding works well as a good starting spot for admin CRUD, which is what I was currently doing with it. (Especially since there isn’t an ActiveAdmin/Administrate type gem that I know of)
While I agree that having the generated stories/tests breaking can be scary for new devs, I think not having them and not having to worry about them establishes a poor pattern. From my perspective, one of the first places a change should occur is in the test. Then refining the story to make sure it plays nicely with the changes.
I guess it really depends on what your target audience needs. If it is for quickly prototyping or new developers, then refining the scaffolding makes sense to me. But I understand only so much time and effort to spend on various things.
Are you against adding tests/stories to the scaffolding? I may be up for contributing if it would be of interest. Otherwise I can create custom templates as you said.
Thanks for your time!