The way we do it currently is by calling load from inside of load, via different "pipelines" and processors which is quite elegant and completely impossible to work with.

That’s pretty gnarly. While the name of the constant LOOSE_APP_ASSETS gives me some idea of what it does, it still takes a second to wrap your mind around. If you were trying to figure out what assets are being precompiled and you did a puts config.assets.precompile that lambda object would be utterly baffling.

As you can see, we end up with a lot of boilerplate if-statements. The code is more verbose. And it’s difficult to follow the main logic.