>OTOH I feel that decoupling being somehow essential is a bit of a myth. Whats the supposed benefit for most business. For small and medium sized its irrelevant.

As both Tracy and Viv were alluding to, it's all about n-Tier. And SOA. And distributed applications. If you're writing apps that don't need any of that, then ok, maybe it's not so important to you. But, IMHO, even if you aren't writing those kinds of apps, you'd still be better off thinking in terms of n-tier and separating your data access from your presentation ... then if you ever *do* need to scale it differently, it'll be pretty seamless.

~~Bonnie