For the long run, it would be ideal if all of the objects in the video libs were compiled as individual files. This makes it much easier for newbies since they you don't have to deal with the .pdrc at all, plus it makes handling name conflicts much easier (there are some in Gem for example).
I find libraries are also very convenient because otherwise the number of objects becomes unmageable. if you don't want to deal with .pdrc, you can make a startup script like:
for i in `find $LIBS_DIR -name *.pd_darwin` do export LIBS=$(basename $i .pd_darwin):$LIBS done
and later
pd -lib $LIBS
this allows also to organize libraries in subfolders (also usefull for objects and abstractions)
. g