I agree. To say loosely coupled software is better is just restating the Law of Demeter. The tricky part is figuring out where the interfaces should actually go. Every abstraction comes with overhead, so it only makes sense if it eliminates some emergent complexity from the whole system. Now I guess given the choice between the copy and paste code monkey and the architecture astronaut I'd choose the latter, but I'm pretty sure I'd rather work with someone who is smart and gets things done.

I think it's all too easy to look at old code with today's perspective, and assume the original programmers were idiots without considering what the code base looked like at the time or what were the requirements and time constraints given to them.