@daviddavis, I am all for opening the discussion to a larger audience by my take is to stick with the "Rails way".  Yes, it's opinionated, but I think Foreman has benefited from this approach until now.  There is no standard convention for JSON API's which is a whole other discussion, but the Rails core team is trying to implement some conventions through ActiveModelSerializers which has the 'opinion' to have an object root name for each :show json response.