I do believe that the ActiveModelAdapter is going to conform to JSON api at some point, though I’m not sure when and I haven’t gotten confirmation from the ED team.
@svanderbleek: I imagine you would be able to add patch by extending the RESTAdapter/ActiveModelAdapter. My post is actually irrelevant now as ED has dropped the old state system and the new one is much more streamlined (though I’m still having issues getting validations to work, but that’s a different topic…)