I'm probably not the audience for require.js, because I've never had a situation where I was forced to not have a build step. Once you just accept that there's always a build step, life becomes so much easier.
I feel for you man. I really recommend you just try to build something, even if it's a little demo of some sort, with the assumption that you are going to have a build step.
I just found that the result of that assumption ends up with something that is a lot easier to work with and reason about, than trying to rail against it by using something like r.js.
I'm probably not the audience for require.js, because I've never had a situation where I was forced to not have a build step. Once you just accept that there's always a build step, life becomes so much easier.
[1] http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/subtly-meta-introduction-to-brow...