Also, I'm unsure that even the implementation in <= 0.2.1 would even work in Express 3.x since the handler function always calls next() which will lead to a 404 since res.send() was never called.

Oh, dang. Guess we should have a test for that case.

I'll have to do some digging to figure out when we know we're being used directly, vs in a route callback chain...

I think it's fine to add a new function to serve this feature which basically would have to manually call into the other middleware functions and can't rely on next().

Yeah, I have an angle on inspecting the req.route.callbacks array, see if the current middleware is the end of the chain, and then just res.send(res.body) instead of next(). I fiddled with it a couple weeks ago (hence naming some of the anonymous functions returned as middleware), it's crazy what Express gives access to in the req and res objects.