gaia's style of development since the early days did not encourage a script loader, even though some apps grew ones later. I think they were hoping for ES modules to come along quicker, and preferred to stay "close to the metal". Given gaia deadlines, I expect it will be hard to switch to an AMD loader in the near term. Longer term, I believe it would be advantageous just from the code organization and the standardized optimizations that are possible via r.js. And the syntax should upgrade easily to ES modules whenever they do get more solid.

For people that are interested in an AMD loader, I suggest using [alameda](https://github.com/requirejs/alameda) as it is a smaller AMD loader than requirejs (but still passes vast majority of tests) and comes with a promises a+ module.

But I do not expect the status quo to change in gaia though for the near future. I am happy to help though if someone wants to explore it at some point.