Feature/json api patch

@l8nite @ak47 please review. the way her currently is set up it doesn't really work for json api. our older client gems are built on the stock version but we needed to use this branch for the intake work (which does follow json api specs).

i've PR'd the maintainer but i'm not that confident that this will get merged back in. so by doing this we may be diverting permanently.
If we intend it to be backwards compatible, should have both sets of tests?