Since the introduction of foxy fixtures in Rails 2.0 I have actually reverted to using fixtures. I have had quite a few problems using mocks/stubs because imho they result in brittle tests. Here’s an example using TestUnit http://szeryf.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/does-stubbing-make-your-tests-brittle/ but the same applies to rspec. Generally, I will only use mocks now when I need to test my applications interaction with an external library, or something where the implementation is fixed. Maybe I’ll write a separate post on this sometime.

Have you found any better way to organize this kind of speccing?
I am going through the same pains as you and have begun to go down the road of nested describe sequences… but it still requires me to mock EVERYTHING at the first before(:each) declaration. I would like to incrementally mock/stub as i begin working down through my code and nested describe blocks