This all makes sense. I'm still very curious about what exactly is "making it work." If that makes sense. The attempts at DDD and similar efforts have not worked that well. Even DI has become something that is as annoying as otherwise. When your domain has all of X objects, but you find you have X+Y configuration classes, where Y is a relatively large number, it starts to get obnoxious.

I can say that the times I have relied on factory methods to create objects, this has worked out decently.