 <p>Just because people have written the code and made the source available doesn't mean that it's always going to be good code.</p> <p>The principles you're used to (small classes that do their one thing well) is a good one. But not every developer follows those principles.</p> <p>In the PHP world, a lot of people have worked their way up through it from the early days, when everything was in a single procedural monolithic block of code -- and I've seen some horrendous examples of that still in everyday use. Converting one's mindset from that to an OOP structure at all can be a big leap for some people, and even for people who haven't come from that background, a lot of the code examples they would be learning from are, so it's not a surprise to see monster classes.</p> <p>The short answer is to write code the way you're comfortable with and the way you've been taught. It sounds like you've got better coding practices ingrained into you than most PHP developers out there, so don't feel you have to change just because other people are doing things differently.</p>