[PATCH conductor] #2018 - Cucumber test fixes

Hi all, This series of patches fixes some of the currently-failing Cucumber tests. Note that there are still a *lot* that need fixing. I'll send an email shortly outlining some of them. This patch series also contains a couple of things that weren't broken tests per se, but were either spewing voluminous deprecation warnings (overwriting .validate), or that impeded debugging (handle_error not printing backtraces) and should be fixed anyway. On the note of the .validate deprecation warnings, some external dependency of ours seems to be doing it. I've fixed all occurences in our app (AFAICT) and it's still printed in some spots. This is just a deprecation warning, not a fatal error, so it's not a top priority just yet anyway. -- Matt