Sure, I agree - I'm proposing JSON as an intermediate step toward a well-defined data-model since the thousands of copied config files have evolved over time, so the data-model is a smear of backward-compatibility hacks.

What I was trying to do is get you to explain what you mean by this:

> If our code ran in real-time to show us a representation of the final configuration, and we could trace how each final configuration value was generated, then it wouldn't be a problem. [...] But no systems are designed with this capability, even though it is quite trivial to do. Configuration is always an after-thought.