@tmcinerney For the obvious benefits of relative paths. So that if you had deeply nested modules and were to rename one of the parent directories you wouldn't have to change the path for each of the requires on the child modules. But also because it's part of the [CommonJS spec](http://wiki.commonjs.org/wiki/Modules/1.1). If we are gonna claim we support CommonJS modules we should try to be as close as possible to the spec.