mh.. do not underestimate the cpu usage of require. sure, once the code is up and running, it doesn't matter too much, but I had a codebase with a lot of requires at first, and whenever I updated my code it would result in my entire, usually full bucket being completely drained over the next few ticks. Which is annoying if you're the type of coder who likes to do quick iterations, working on live code.
Since I rewrote my code and started concating with grunt instead of requireing everything, this is not happening anymore.