I can’t remember if it was this topic or another one, but I and several others agreed with you on this point, Tony, that sometimes the effort to refactor an existing application doesn’t seem to be worth the payoff. It can be especially hard to justify to bosses or clients that we would be spending time, changing a bunch of code, and in the end the application would outwardly look and work no differently.
So, for the purpose of comparing implementation choices, I suggest to everyone in this topic that we do so in the context of a brand new application. That is, if we were to sit down and write a brand new application, would we start off using require statements or an autoloader? Why or why not?