[anti-pattern]

Ah, well, nothing is foolproof. Yes, if you don't update your dependency list when dependencies are removed, they might get stale. But I keep up on that stuff and haven't ran into that problem yet. Even if I did, I'd rather have that problem than an app where all the dependencies are global.

[stormbrew]

Sure. I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that, while I'm not fond of the Everything Is Magic approach rails often takes, I actually think this is one case where it was an entirely pragmatic effort to work around a poorly developed area of the ruby language when a program gets large (in terms of files, lines, or both). And Bundler.require is an evolution of that practice.