> I wondered about passing in __FILE__ and building a require to the absolute path, which should also shortcut the lookup?

I _think_ that would probably work, but I dislike it for a few versions:

* Years of doing ruby has taught me that absolute requires are rarely what you want.
* Mixing absolute and relative requires can often lead to pain, where it allows a file to be loaded twice if you reference it in two different ways
* `require_relative` is the 1.9+ way of doing this; why re-invent it?