My finance classes are at least partly a few decades out of date :-)

Another reason that I recall is that (presumably) if a company does a split, it indicates that management is confident in the future--and a reverse split presumably indicates the opposite.

>I do wonder, with the relatively recent availability of fractional share ownership, if the effect of splits will be more muted in the future

Certainly, we've seen share prices of a fair number of companies recently that would have been considered well out of "normal" ranges historically.