Storing configuration as plaintext files is definitely a big positive, as it allows you to use standard and battle-tested file apis to manipulate them instead o

Storing configuration as plaintext files is definitely a big positive, as it allows you to use standard and battle-tested file apis to manipulate them instead of an opaque blob that then requires an additional platform specific API. The only benefit I can see of a monolithic registry is that it's technically all organized in one central place, compared to say the Linux practice of scattering app settings in home directories (although XDG does help standardize this). But in practice the Windows approach seem to provide an unnecessarily tight coupling.