Hallo!
i do not agree, that we (pd-users) should just stick with that. i know, this is a very old story, but if there would be a unified way to load externals, it would be no problem at all to make patches, that make use of externals, work out of the box. to delegate this issue to the user just doesn't have any advantage at all.
that's what should be possible with pd-extended ...
LG Georg