Dan, I think what you want here is an [Rspec custom matcher](https://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec/wiki/Custom-Matchers)

That said, we're at a spot where this is an improvement over what we had before and we should merge this and improve upon it later, maybe as an exercise at the next meetup. You are touching on a bunch of things that rspec/capybara can do to make testing much nicer and it would be good if more people could see.