Rails core - Mar 2013 - Rationale for HMT << writing multiple join records instead of checking for an existing?

Hey all-

Just curious - in my app I have a membership schema that uses a join table 
which holds some settings (like active / archived, etc) on the status of 
the membership.

Trying to use the association HMT helper methods properly, I was adding 
people to the collection using <<

But.. in my app, I need to allow people to add many members at once, and 
one option is using a CSV file, so I want to be prepared for the 
possibility of adding the same member multiple times, etc.. so I was 
dismayed to discover that using << will create identical join records in 
the database if the same object is added more than once.  Now, for the 
"return" that''s fine, uniq: true gets me the right values..
but since i
need to work with the join table itself from time to time, having multiple 
records is a non-starter.

I''m guessing << was meant to be pretty quick-n-dirty, but it
seems a little
TOO dirty (from a data perspective) in a HMT context — shouldn''t
<< have a
little more intelligence built in so as not to dirty up ones database?

I''m just checking for the object''s existence now before
adding, but my
instincts told me that << on an existing object would be ignored instead
of
executed.

Thoughts?  Maybe I''m missing something dumb.

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