Ok, I reproduced the problem I was having. Unsure if this was just an old side effect, but basically if I run db:schema:load instead of db:migrate, when setup.rb prompts me to run the test suite, it fails because it seems like the test db's schema was never loaded. Maybe db:migrate solves that by a side-effect? 

Anyway, I'm going to leave as-is for now, but feel free to investigate further.