Makes perfect sense.

Welcome of the 'using active record with repository pattern' contradiction.

Ideally, in a perfect world, you would return orm-agnostic php object from your repositories, having relationships as collections, etc... Which, let's face it, is a lot to implement.

So all its down to having a perfect architecture vs having something done quickly (and which work the same :) ) , it's almost always a tradeoff.

Eloquent is awesome as a RAD tool, because it's really flexible, making things like fetching relationships from the view possible. When I use Eloquent or ActiveRecord, I usually use it to its full potential, without overengineering things to much with repositories or so on. Or switch to a Data Mapper if I want a strict separation of concerns.

Just to say, for me i think leaking a little 'logic' in the view is ok, in 90% cases, unless you plan to reuse them in a non-laravel application (or even non-php), in which case you probably won't be using blade anyway.