> While you lose out on some of the benefits in the short term, in the long term you get the benefit that previously hard-to-decompose monolithic legacy setups can be sliced and diced gradually until you have units that are reasonable to start rebuilding cleanly. This one of those areas where layers etc. really are quite useful.

So. Much. This.

I work with very view greenfield projects. I work with a lot of existing, complicated, annoying monolithic architectures. Approaches that let me start refactoring those into something vaguely sane are a godsend.