While developing a plugin I discovered that the plugin loader system is recursively calling imp.load_module() on every file it finds under the PLUGIN_PATH, not every directory / module. Because of this __init__.py is not always parsed prior to other code in the module.
I'm cutting an issue instead of a PR because I can't think of a situation where doing module imports rather than file imports would break something but I want to get some second opinions because maybe I'm just not very imaginative.