[harshavr]

Since you can use gconftool shell command to get & set key values, it seems consistent with the unix philosophy. It is actually easier to use in a script than to parse a text file. For tree level operations, one can use the standard directory commmands like mv, cp inside the ~/.gconf directory. gconf-edit is a tool you use only if you want to. One could actually write a simple emacs mode for doing the same thing.