Yeah, I can sort-of tell all that.  The question is more about what is actually used by the edit/new views, or more generally, views with forms that get submitted, and that's more about the <input ... name="card[subcards][name]" and such, no?  In fact, I though I recalled param['cards'] being an array with the name as a value.  The hashes with cardname as keys seem like a variation that isn't so easy to support.  I mean, how to a change the name, type and content in one http transaction.