Does rake db:schema:load need the whole environment?

I ran into a “chicken before the egg” problem where a gem was expecting
the
tables to be present when loaded which was fine until you try and build
the
db from scratch using db:setup. When it hits db:schema:load the
environment
loads and the gem errors out as the tables aren’t present. I made a
custom
task that connected to ActiveRecord and then loads the schema file.
Using
essentially the same methods as db:create uses to create the db and
schema:load uses to load the schema. This seems to work without
problems.

Is there a reason the environment is normally loaded for this task? Just
wondering If I’m missing something that’ll kick me in the ass later.

I read and followed some issues about
it: Environment loaded too late to affect db:setup · Issue #4772 · rails/rails · GitHub
but they don’t say why they decided to load or not load the env at the
time.

Cheers,
Brian