[Lazare]

You make some interesting assertions, but 1) they contradict everything I have learned from painful experience and 2) they seem to make no sense.

> It's actually quite important to keep metadata about the config / params / etc. specifically out of those files, so that they are absolutely nothing but value files. Information about why a file contains those values belongs elsewhere

Okay, I'll bite: Why? In every area of programming, we learn that mental context changes are harmful. We learn to avoid gotos, not abuse exceptions, add meaningful comments, and seperate concerns all in large part so when we look at a file, we can understand what's going on without referencing other files.

Now you say "oh, unless there are some config values in that file, then it's important for it to be as cryptic as possible!" Surely you see why that sounds a bit odd? Should we also base64 encode the file? Do you also hate descriptive variable names in config files?