I'll take dotfiles I can grep and mange with a text editor over settings littered all over a central binary registry. But maybe that's just what I'm used to.
Every single program has to write logic to parse/store/query/validate those values. A common API with a single store can be type-enforced, backed up, and likely easier to work with from an internationalization perspective.
I do like dotfiles for portable apps where everything the program needs is in one folder. Personally, my need for portable apps has gone down year on year.
I do like dotfiles for portable apps where everything the program needs is in one folder. Personally, my need for portable apps has gone down year on year.