[DanWaterworth]

I'm specifically talking about failure of components here rather than bugs. When you have more components that can fail independently, dealing with failure is necessarily more difficult, for the simple reason that there are more ways that you can fail.

> interface-enforced simplicity is not the only reason you would go with queues and RPC

No, certainly not. I shouldn't have implied that that was the case. However, if reliability, maintainability or simplicity is the reason why you are considering breaking up your large components then perhaps there is a better way of achieving your goal.

> it is much more difficult than you think to enforce such abstract common disciplines on a large project.

I'm speaking from my experience working on medium-large programs written exclusively by myself. I don't know that my methodology would scale to a team, but I also don't know that it or something similar to it couldn't.