[wvenable]

I think all the wrong lessons were learned here.

Users do care about how maintainable your code is. They're often committed to your piece of software. If you code is bad, they will eventually feel it. I've experienced that with my own software over time and software built by other companies. At work, the end users know our financial system is fundamentally unmaintainable and we aren't going to buy the fancy total re-write new version from that vendor.

The other lesson is that it's entirely possible that a single file PHP monolith is not a crappy ball of mud. It might even be cleaner and easier to work with than "best practices" over-abstracted over-built monstrosity.