You've obviously never had an amateur developer run smack-into open_basedir issues before. The application basically gets a 404 error when including dependencies, until they look for open_basedir configuration. A developer really needs to know when open_basedir has restricted an include, because the error is really vague.

And shared hosts don't generally allow files outside the webroot of a site. When they do, they might already have open_basedir set to only allow inclusion WITHIN the webroot.

Most packages like Wordpress are developed to run on the maximum number of servers. It isn't built to run on the best, or smartest configured ones—but the average, out-of-the-box Apache/PHP install.