[Perceptes]

Another thing to consider is thread safety. "require" is not thread safe, so if your app is multi-threaded, it's actually a good idea to load everything up front. Granted, you can still do this with manual requires, but Bundler.require does that job for you pretty nicely.

[anti-pattern]

Ah, that isn't something I considered. I don't write my apps multi-threaded, so it shouldn't be an issue, but definitely good to be aware of.