The alternatives sorta fail the KISS principal since in general the registry grew out of the win3.x .ini config API's which are sorta the equivalent of the file

The alternatives sorta fail the KISS principal since in general the registry grew out of the win3.x .ini config API's which are sorta the equivalent of the files in /etc, but the format was more regular. Given its mostly read only data, I suspect no one thought that it was going to grow into the huge monstrosity its become, yet at the same time, unless your looking for a full ACID database, and your looking for a lightweight solution it would probably sit a lot closer to the registry API and format than it would something like sqlite. Someone at some point should have probably said enough, and duplicated some effort and kept the registry for OS/etc settings while splitting off the people who want something closer to an ACID database into an actual database. Of course that has happened a couple times now (aka MDB?).