Frankly I'm Python ignorant

I'm fairly Perl-OO ignorant, (that's why I used Python as an example ;-) but I'm pretty sure they perform identically in respect to your comment. What I meant by the Python approach was that, in addition to the OO module approach, you can also just have a file with a bunch of subroutines and import them directly from that.

I strongly agree with your last paragraph as well, especially about causing unnecessary bloat in the core.