[Pokepokalypse]

I used to do this on a weekly basis with my Windows desktops (95, 98, NT, XP, and 7 was the last one I bothered with). I used various tools to automate this process, (nLite was a good one), and wrote scripts to perform application setup (back in the bad old days before chocolatey).

This had huge benefits in terms of maintaining a very performant Windows desktop.

Then, I also baked-in my security configurations with another set of scripts. So it was always in a consistent configuration, (even if I had to "temporarily" disable something that was blocking me or broke something, I could always return to my "known-good-configuration").

I've also done the same with my linux systems.

Mac OS X has always been curiously resistant to full automation, however. I know some people have done it; but there's something about this ecosystem that makes it very difficult; and I kind of think that's by-design, (to thwart the hackintosh people).

I think it would be extremely valuable to be able to do this on Mac OS X; because customizing the OS is central to being able to get a good productive user-experience (especially for power-users), and I'm often stymied trying to accomplish this in a repeatable manner, on Mac OS X.