I like layered config as well. It really should be the default way of thinking about config. Our custom application framework handles that exact sort of layerin

I like layered config as well. It really should be the default way of thinking about config. Our custom application framework handles that exact sort of layering and it's wonderful. I give it an annotated class representing the config that I need and it handles populating the fields from the config and generating the help message if something is missing.