Removed deprecations from lib specs

Mainly housekeeping changes, clearing deprecations without making more tests pass, though I should highlight two process changes in this (I know, sloppy pull request; I promise to do better with the next one[s]):

1) Added the requirement for spec_helper into the .rspec file simply because the require statements were getting kind of obscure in some of the deeply nested spec files.

2) Created a couple of rspec-local distribution files and .gitignore'd .rspec-local. This allows every dev to load the .rspec-local appropriate for their ruby and debugger preferences, without getting into arcane conditional requires. Debugger doesn't work with recent rubies, but its substitute, byebug, doesn't work with ruby 1.9.x and ideally we want to run on both (at least until Rails 5 pushes us off Ruby 1.9.x).