Are there any negative side effects to setting hooks this way?

[xoft]

By the way, the fact that hook registrations outside of function calls work is a side effect of what we've been trying to do once, a feature that would allow multiple plugins to be merged into a single plugin, simply by copying the files over (assuming that the filenames had no conflict). This was abandoned, mostly because of the Info.lua special file and because it didn't bring as many benefits as expected, but the underlying features were left over.