Yes, a giant table filled with hundreds of rows like "network.auth.subresource-img-cross-origin-http-auth-allow default boolean false" is in fact arcane.
I've always thought it weird that Firefox's about:config UI is not much better than editing a flat configuration file. Clearly there wasn't much effort put into it. Even IE's configuration is far better organised than that, grouping everything into hierarchical categories.
Uhh, Firefox does have the a proper GUI settings area. about:config is for experiments, internal flags automatically set according to the user's system configuration, or niche features not useful to most users (and so not promoted to a spot on one of the graphical panels).
With the "user.js" feature [0], you can actually control them from a flat configuration file.