[berkes]

If you write software that no-one uses I guess its fine to write it using brainfuck on a atari, I guess.

But I consider myself a user too. I consider myself-in-ten-years a user too. I'm sometimes still maintaining some crap that I wrote 20 years ago and boy I wished I didn't cut that many corners back then.

Tight coupling brings a large range of problems, loosely coupling a large range of benefits. The only two major downsides of loosely coupled code that I have encountered, are when the coupling is done at the wrong place: poorly abstracted code is worse than not-abstracted code, often.

The second downside that in order to properly (un)couple code, you need knowledge that you often lack at the point of writing (often resulting in downside #1) and that gaining the knowledge can significantly stall a project (aka: we cannot start building because we haven't found the perfect model yet).

Other than that: loosely coupled code is much more fun to work with, for one, which makes that I like working on some projects, bu really dread working on others. Having fun, alone, is enough benefit for me. Even in my private one-off-tools (which then turn out to not be one-off but are dragged along for literally decades, sigh).