Mms proposed updates

These are my proposed updates, mostly reflecting the things that I've been doing without documenting them. Feel free to tear them apart. I'll annotate changes that I think need explanation.
I prefer `~> major.minor.patch` so that we don't have to head over to rubygems.org to see what the latest patch is, but I agree that hardcoding a constraint here is useful to protect against `bundle update` operations.