I was accused of being ignorant for asking a very basic, highly fundamental question, which apparently nobody has yet to answer sensibly. Honestly I have zero respect for these people.

Sycophants, could someone please address my question?

- I work in Python as does 80% of the infrastructure world.

- I want to tweak a config setting in your precious config file.

- I want to do it without linking against a compiler

- I want to do it without XML/XSLT (what the actual fuck, someone really suggested using another more practical data format to tweak/introspect code?)

- I want to do it without writing a tree-walking routine

- I want to do it without writing regexes

- I want to do it while preserving whitespace and comments and similar user edits.

Come on, this should be easy and practical, right? After all, you're obviously correct. Note I can do all this with XML, not that I'd use it, but it's still a better solution than config-as-code.