  A new approach has been used to explain the experimental data for the
$^{16}$O+$^{28}$Si system over a wide energy range in the laboratory system
from 29.0 to 142.5 MeV. A number of serious problems has continued to plague
the study of this system for a couple of decades. The explanation of anomalous
large angle scattering data; the reproduction of the oscillatory structure near
the Coulomb barrier; the out-of-phase problem between theoretical predictions
and experimental data; the consistent description of angular distributions
together with excitation functions data are just some of these problems. These
are long standing problems that have persisted over the years and do represent
a challenge calling for a consistent framework to resolve these difficulties
within a unified approach. Traditional frameworks have failed to describe these
phenomena within a single model and have so far only offered different
approaches where these difficulties are investigated separately from one
another. The present work offers a plausible framework where all these
difficulties are investigated and answered. Not only it improves the
simultaneous fits to the data of these diverse observables, achieving this
within a unified approach over a wide energy range, but it departs for its
coupling potential from the standard formulation. This new feature is shown to
improve consistently the agreement with the experimental data and has made
major improvement on all the previous coupled-channels calculations for this
system.
