[grenoire]

When you give people the freedom to use the KV store as they wish, you inevitably run into a meta-problem whereby the way they write their data structures in to the KV store is varied across applications. I don't know if you could standardise this structure beyond enforcing applications to use an OS-assigned private store, but I don't see how that would work with portable executables etc.

I suppose you'd need to be very opinionated for it to work, but people will still bodge it to make it work with their needs that your system doesn't natively satisfy (people putting JSON strings in the values, for example).

[mike_hock]

And how is that a bigger problem than people using the filesystem any way they wish and putting arbitrary content in files?

[kevin_thibedeau]

The filesystem is manageable by users (with few exceptions). You can't easily discover which part of a registry hive is associated with an application.

[mike_hock]

It's precisely as discoverable as the filesystem. It's a tree like the filesystem. With names given to nodes by the application, just like the filesystem.