True, they are all just methods, but it's basically just an altered version of Object#send, and the current Rails implementation only significantly differs from it in the specific situation it's intended for.

I realize there are a range of preferences regarding ways to tackle the problem this is intended to solve, and I'm relatively agnostic about the overall issue, but if the implementation is basically a #send that guards against nil, then it would be unexpected for it to deviate remarkably from #send when dealing with non-nil objects.