Hi @sboyleuf!
There is no strict general ruling on when to split functionality into different bundles or when to keep everything together in one.
The latest AEM Maven archetype comes with a single core bundle because that's how you usually start a green field project. It gives you a quick and easy start for a new project and comes with everything that needed.
From my practical experience, a lot of projects are totally fine with having all their Java functionality in one bundle as their development is handled by a single team and deployment done through a single JCR package that contains everything. When your project grows (or you start with a project that's designed to be big) you may come to a point where you find benefits by splitting your code into different bundles and/or packages.
Reasons to split could be:
- Varying release cycles for different parts of your application
- Dedicated teams working on different parts of the code base
- A growing code base where you feel that certain parts should be handled separately.
- Different technologies, libraries or functionalities that you want to separate.
This is not an exclusive list and there can be other reasons. Also most of these reason don't make it mandatory to work with different bundles (the release cycle one probably, though).
Hope that helps!
